Poetry and the Fate of the Senses 9780226774145, 0226774147

Citation preview

POETRY

AND

OF THE

SUSAN

THE

FATE

SENSES

STEWART

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/poetryfateofsens0000stew

POETRY

OF

AND

THE

SUSAN

THE

FATE

SENSES

STEWART

WITHDRAWN FROM UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA UISRARIES

Tue University oF Caicaco Press Cricace axp Lonpox

‘Susan Stewart is the Regan Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and a MacArthur fellow. She is the author of three books of poems. most recently, of literary and art criticism, including On LongThe Forest, as well us many works ing: Narratives of the Miniature. the Gigantic, the Souventr, the Collection and Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation.

‘The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd, London (©2002 by The University of Chicago All nghts reserved. Published 2002 Printed in the United States of America 1110090807 0605040302 54321 ASBN {cloth 0.226-77413.9 ISBN (papert 0-226-77414.7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ‘Stewart, Susan (Susan A.J, 1952 Poctry and the fate of the senses / Susan Stewart Pe cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-226-77413-9 — ISBN 0-226-77414-7 [pbk;) L Lyric poctry—History and criticism, 2. Poetry—History and criticism. 2 Poetics, 1 Title PNI386 $74 2002 809.1—dedt 2001005413

© The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirementsof the ‘American National Standard for Information Seiences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992,, OF PENNSYLVANIA LIBRARIES

In memory, HES., 1926-1999

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from

Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/poetryfateofsens0000stew

POETRY

OF

AND

THE

SUSAN

THE

FATE

SENSES

STEWART

WITHDRAWN UNIVERSITY NNSYLVANIA UBRARIES

oF Curcaco Press ann Lonpon

‘Susan Stewart is the Regan Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and a MacArthur fellow. She is the author of theee books of poems, most recently The Forest, as well ay many works of literary and art criticism, including On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature. the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection and (Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation. ‘The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 ‘The University of Chicago Press, Ltd, London (© 2002 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2002 Printed in the United States of America 1110070908 0605040302 54321

ISBN |elotht 0.226 -77413-9 ISBN {paper} 0.226.77414-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stewart, Susan (Susan A, 1952 Poetry and the fate of the senses / Susan Stewart. Pp cm. Includes bibliographical references (p._) and index. ISBN 0-226-77413-9 — ISBN 0-296-77414-7 (pbk) Lyric poetry—History and criticiam, 2. Poetry—History and criticism. 3 Poctics, 1 Title PN1A56.874 2002 809.1 deat 2001005413

© The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirementsof the ‘American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSIZ39.48-1992, PENNSYLVANIA

LIBRARIES:

In memory, HES., 1926-1999

CONTENTS

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Carrer | IN THE DaRkness L ‘The Privations of Night and the Origins of Poiésis M, Laughter, Weeping, and the Order of the Senses a. The Lyric Eidos Charter 2 Sound L Dynamics of Poetic Sound iL Hopkins: Invocation and Listening CHaprer

3 VOICE AND Possession The Beloved’s Voice ‘Three Cases of Lyric Possession

CHApTER 4 FACING, TOUCH. AND VERTIGO. The Experience of Beholding 1 nL. Touch in Aesthetic Forms Vertigo: The Legacy of Baroque Ecstasy ML CHaprer t 0. ML IV.

3

THE FORMS AND NUMBERS OF TIME

The Deictic Now ‘Traces of Human Motion: The Ubi Sune Tradition Meditation and Number: Traherne’s Centuries ‘The Problem of Poetic History

9 90 wr 124

Conerenrs

GHAPTER 6 OUT OF THE DARKNESS: NOCTURNES 1 Finch’s Transformation of the Night Work Hl, The Emergence of a Nocturne Tradition

War and the Alienation of the Senses Two Lyric Critiques of Epic: Brooks and Walcott

AFTERBORN Notes REFERENCES INDEX OF PoEMs GENERAL INDEX

€3

1. Il,

Lyric COUNTER Eric

ee §

CHAPTER 7

255 20

es

vie.

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Tis is a book about poetic making of all kinds, and particularly about such making by means of measured language. My method has been to explain to myself and to the reader a general theory of poetic forms—

forms arising out of sense experience and producing, as they make sense experience intelligible to others, intersubjective meaning. Thave addressed several broad developments in the history of art, but I have wanted as well to engage individual works phenomenologically as a way of sharing their intentions and furthering their reception.

My emphasis on common human experiences of the senses, facial ex-

pression, vocalization of sounds, motion, and rhythm directs the theoretical part of this argument toward, if not universality, a formalism that is

meant

to reach across various historical and cultural contexts. For the

‘most part, the works I have chosen for discussion are those I have thought

about over time and about which I have something to say. Like anyone

who writes on poetic forms, I have heen restricted as well by the availability of permissions for reproduction. Whenever possible, Ihave quoted poems in their entirety. There is a necessity to my choices, but it is not absolute, and the book could have been written with a different set of examples. It is my hope that other readers and writers will find this study helpful for the analysis of other bodies of work, ‘A project of ten years, this book evolved from work with students in poetics, aesthetics, and the history of the lyric at Temple University, the

X

PARFACE AND AceNowLEpeMeNTs

‘Tyler School of Art in Rome, the Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins

University, the University of Pennsylvania, and most recently the Uni-

versity of California at Berkeley. Over that period I benefited from many opportunities to present the work as lectures and conference presentations, and [particularly thank those institutions where Twas able to speak ‘of the project at length: the Poetics Program at the State University of New York-Buffalo, the Writers’ Workshops at the University of lowa, the Art History and Communications Departments of the University of Sussex, the Fine Arts Department of the University of New South Wales, and

the English Department of the University of South Carotina Thegan much of my research under the auspices of a fellowship from the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, where I was fortunate to have Alexander Waintrub as my research assistant. A Mac-

Arthur Fellowship has made it possible for me to complete the project.

From 1996 to 1999,a Lila Wallace Individual Writer's Award gave me funds

to continue my research and also to establish a poetry program for adult literacy students in the branches of the Northwest Regional Public Li brary in Philadelphia, Discussing poems and poetics with these students, who often had an extensive knowledge of oral tradition and at the same

time were just learning to read and write, was an invaluable experience for

rethinking many of my assumptions about understanding and teaching poetry.

My work was greatly eased by the help of librarians at the University of Pennsylvania, the British Library, the Folklore Society Library at the University of London, the Vatican Library, and the University of California at Berkeley. My deepest thanks are due to individuals, Anyone who knows Allen Grossman's work on poetics will see its imprint throughout this book, and my debt to him for his suggestions regarding the manuscript is immeas-

urable. Marjorie Perlof’s generous and careful reading of these chapters led to significant changes in the level of detail and texture of the argument, and her enthusiasm for the project has heen an ongoing gift. My editors at the University of Chicago Press, Alan Thomas and Randy Petilos, have been tunstinting in their support of my work in both poetry and prose Years of conversation and correspondence regarding literature and art with Susan Howe,

Ann

Hamilton,

Robert Pogue Harrison, Alan Singer, and

Brunella Antomarini are woven into every aspect of my thinking. Charles Baxter's engagement with, and collection of, musical nocturnes enriched my research on that genre, as did the work of my colleague at Penn, Jeffrey Kallberg, Robert Harrison's thoughtful reading of the conclusion encour-

aged me as | was finishing revisions. Yoonmee Chang and Sam Stewart-

PAEEACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

x

Halevy helped create the book's interior images, and Bernie Rhie completed the index. Ann Hamilton deftly shaped most of the book's visual form. This work is dedicated to the memory of my father, with love and gratitude to my immediate and extended family who carry forward the memory of his person—and it is also dedicated to his memory itself: his vast delight in, and encyclopedic knowledge of, the natural world, Earlier and substantially different versions of portions of some chapters appeared as essays published as follows: from chapter 2: “Letter on Sound,” in Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, ed. Charles Bemstein (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998], 29-52; from chap-

ter 3: “Lyric Possession,” Critical Inquiry 22, no. 1 (Autumn/Winter 1995): 34-63; from chapter 4: “From the Museum of Touch,” in Material

Memories, ed. Marius Kwint (London: Berg, 1999], 17-36, from chapter 5:

“Preface to a Lyric History,” in The Uses of Literary History, ed. Marshall

Brown (Durham, N.C.:

Duke University Press, 1995), 199-218, and “Tra-

hemne’s Centuries,” in Centuries’ Ends: Narrative Means, ed. Robert New-

man (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1996), 89-113, notes on

328-334. Sources for chapter frontispieces are as follows, Chapter 1: J. M. W. Turner, The Beacon Light (detail), ca, 1835-40.

Reprinted by permission

cof the National Museum of Wales, Chapters 2 and 3: The}. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, California, Unknown artist, Sculptural Group of a Seated Poet and Two Sirens (detail). 350-300 ».c. Chapter 4: Caravaggio, Doubting Thomas (detail), Alinari/Art Resource, NY. Chapter 5: Gian Lorenzo

Bernini, Ecstasy of St. Teresa (detail). S. Maria della Vittoria, Rome, Italy. Alinari/Art Resource, NY. Chapter6: James MacNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold, the Falling Rocket, ca. 1875 (detail), © The Detroit Institute of Arts 1989, Chapter 7: Unknown artist, “Execution of Rebels,” ‘The Column of Marcus Aurelius, sculpture after 4.0. 173. Afterborn: face to face {writing 2). Copyright 2000 Ann Hamilton. Photographs courtesy

Sean Kelly, New York. (The image was taken in fall 1999 in Alfred New York with Ann Hamilton and was made by placinga pinhole camera in the mouth’s cavity and opening the lips to expose the film to light.)

IN THE

DARKNESS =

All general privations are great, because they are terrible: Vacwity, Darke ness, Solitude, and Silence Edmund Burke I.

Tue PaivaTions oF NicHr AND THE ORIGINS oF Porésis

W««

do we fear when, in solitude, we fear absolute darkness? It is not death that we fear, fordeath cannot be imagined as other than

the end of imagining; to fear death in the darkness is to approach the darkness asa veil between worlds and not to encounter the object of fear itself And it is not danger that we fear, for danger would as well give a force or shape to this terrible absence of force or shape. The darkness presses against us and yet has no boundary, without edge or endl, it erases and mutes the limits of our being—not as an expansion, but rather as a.contraction, of whatever the mind can hold as an image of the human. It is unbearable, this loneliness of the mind working on its own to maintain the outline, the figure, of the person. Frozen, voiceless, a prisoner without sentence, the mind in the dark has no object to reflect on and no abject to limit the endless racing of its reflections. In the end, the fear of the darkness is the fear that the darkness will not end Ie will be the argument of this book that the cultural, or form-giving, 1

2.

CHARTER One

work of poetry is to counter the oblivion of darkness. To make such a statement may seem more fancifully “poetic” than true, But itis precisely in material ways that poetry is a force against effacement—not merely for individuals but for communities through time as well. The task of aesthetic production and reception in general is to make visible, tangible, and audible the figures of persons, whether such persons are expressing the particulars of sense impressions or the abstractions of reason or the many ‘ways such particulars and abstractions enter into relations with one an-

other. As metered language, language that retains and projects the force of individual sense experience and yet reaches toward intersubjective meaning, poetry sustains and transforms the threshold between individual and, social existence. Poetic making is an anthropomorphic project; the poet

undertakes the task of recognition in time—the unending tragic Orphic task of drawing the figure of the other—the figure of the beloved who reciprocally can recognize one’s own figure—out of the darkness. To make something where and when before there was nothing. The poet's tragedy

lies in the fading of the referent in time, in the impermanence of whatever is grasped. The poct’s recompense is the production of a form that enters into the transforming life of language. In thinking of poetic making as a counter to the oblivion of darkness, we continue, under aesthetic terms, an argument of long concern to Western philosophy. The interdiction against thinking that which is not in Plato's Sophist is introduced by G. W. F. Hegel in the opening to his

Phenomenology of Mind as a specific problem of our encounter with the Night: Sense-certainty itself has thus to be asked: What is the This? Hf we take it {in the two-fold form of its existence, as the Now and as the Here, the dialectic it has in ie will take a form as intelligible as the This itself, To the question, What is the Now? we reply, for example, the Now is night-time. ‘The Now that is night is kept fixed, ic it is treated as what itis given ‘ut to be, as something which is; but it proves to he rather a something which is not, The Now itself no doubt maintains itself, but as what is not night; simitarly in its relation to the day which the Now is at present, it ‘maintains tse as something that is also not day, or as altogether something negative, This self-maintaining Now is therefore not something im‘mediate but something mediated, for, qua something that remains and preserves itself itis determined through and by means of the fact that something else, namely day and night, isnot. ... A simple entity of this sort, which is by and through negation, which is neither this nor that, which is not-this, and with equal indifference, this as well a8 that—a

(THE Damaness

thing of this kind we call a Universal. The Universal is therefore in point of fact the truth of sense-certainty, the true content of sense-experience.!

What we find here in embryo is Hegel's position on the ontology of self-consciousness. Human beings cannot know themselves in relation to an external nature that will appear as an endless presentation of particuJars, each defined, as a man’s being is defined under such conditions, in relation to that which it is ot—an indefinite definition by negation. And human beings cannot leap to a self-creation by interior, subjective means, either—to declare "T am 1," to claim self-coincidence as the grounds for being, is to suffer from a tautology that can only be remedied by the knowledge of its tautological status, The flux of sense impressions has a transitive and intransitive aspect. What propels us outward will also transform us, and it is only by finding means of making sense impressions intelligible to others that we are able to situate ourselves and our experiences within what is universal, In this process, language has a particular prominence as the means of intersubjective knowledge, Language exists before our individual existence: language, a made thing made of our own nature, is at the same time our vehicle of individuation. When we express our existence in language, ‘when we create objective linguistic forms that are intelligible to others and enduring in time, we literally bring light into the inarticulate world that is the night of preconsciousness and suffering, As we will see, poiésis as figuration relies on the senses of touching, sceing, and hearing that are central to the encounter with the presence of others, the encounter of reecognition between persons. These are the senses of face-to-face meetings and they are of great significance in the history of art and the hierarchy of the senses more generally because of their role in the creation of intersubjective experience and meaning, Their capacity for extension, volition, and distantiation in the end contributes to freeing us from the very burden of immediacy, of the overwhelming flux of external stimuli, sense experience in general can impose.

Aristotle had argued in The Generation of Animals that sense perception is what gives animals knowledge. All living beings are driven toward the reproduction of life, and sense perception in animals instantiates a movement outward: For plants have no other funetion or activity in their being except the gencration of seed, so that since this is done through the coupling of male ‘and female, nature has arranged them together by mingling them. ., . But the animal's funetion is not only to generate (for that is common to all

4

Guarren One

living things), bur also they all participate in some sort of cognition, some ‘of them in more, some in less, some in very littleat all. For they have perception, and perception is a sort of cognition. Its value or lack of valve in ‘our eyes differs greatly according as we compare it with intelligence or with the soulless kind of things. Compared with being intelligent, merely to participate in touch and taste seems like nothing but compared with a plant or stone it seems wonderful. One would welcome even this share of ‘cognition, rather than lie dead and non-existent. Its by perception that animals differ from things that are merely alive*

The sense perception of animals is the basis of the link between their own particularity as organisms and the life of the species through reproduction, and it is as well the ground for their desire for an objective being, an other, by means of which such reproduction will take place, According to Hegel, too, only living, transforming things can strive toward consciousness of themselves, and such striving is dependent on what is universal in particulars and particular in universals. All beings striving toward consciousness are motivated by a desire for an object and are dependent on such an object for self-knowledge. In the allegory of the ‘master and slave that follows Hegel's discussion of sense certainty, the master is able to wrest recognition from the slave. But the master does not see the universal aspect of recognition, Incapable of reciprocating such recognition, the master is dependent on a practice of destruction— 4 practice of demand without transformation that will of course in the end result in his own death; The slave, however, recognizes not just the master but also the universal and never-ending task of consciousnes in work that is both the transformation of nature and the means of selftransformation and self-overcoming, the slave as maker creates himself in the long path that extends from the night of sense certainty, The slave does not die with the death of his outward form as does the master—the slave leaves the mark of his practices in the world and forms a link with what is universal in human culture.’ In Existence and Existents, Emmanuel Levinas also discusses the night in phenomenological terms; {We could say that the night is the very experience of the there i, ifthe ‘term experience wete not inapplicable toa situation which involves the total exclusion of light. When the forms of things ate dissolved in the hight, the darkness of the night, which is neither an object nor the quality of an object, invades like a presence. In the night, where we are riven to it, we are not dealing with anything. But this nothing is not thatof

pure nothingness, There is no longer this of that, there is not “some: thing,” But this universal absence is in turn a presence, an absolutely un. avoidable presence; It is not the dialectical counterpart of absence, and we do not grasp it throug a thought. h It is immediately there, There is no dis: ‘course, Nothing responds to us but this silence, the voice of this silence is understood and frightens like the silence of those infinite spaces Pascal speaks of:

For Levinas, this experience of silence and infinity—that which Blaise

Pascal spoke of in his famous pensée “Le Silence éternel de ces espaces

infinis m’effraie”—always surrounds the subject as a nondialectical relation. It evokes not the fear of death but the horror of immortality, of an unending “drama ol existence.” As we consider the form-making capacity of

poiésis for the creation of intersubjectivity, Levinas reminds us of another

fear, a fear that the necessity of such activity is never-ending, that it will exhaust us and outlive us if it is not met by the acknowledgment and reeognition of others, Burke's “privations” were in fact taken from his read: ing of Virgil's images of Hell.” We can find an account of the shattered human figure in the darkness

in the oldest extant Western poems.

In Hesiod’s Theogony,

the Night is

replete with all that refuses or tears apart the relations between human

beings:

Night bore hateful Doom and dark Fate and Death, she bore Sle bore the tribe of Dreams. And secondly gloomy Night bo painful Misery, bedded with none of the gods; and the Hesperides, who mind fair golden apples beyond the famed Oceanus, and the trees that bear that fruit; and the Fates she bore, and the mercilessly punishing Furies who prosecute the transgressions of men and gods—never do the ‘goddesses cease from their terrible wrath until they have paidt sinner his due, And baleful Night gave birth to Resentment also, an affliction for mortal men, and after her she bore Deceit and Intimacy, and accursed Old Age, and she bore hard-hearted Strife Hateful Strife bore painful Toil, Neglect, Starvation, and tearful Pain, Rattles, Combats, Bloodshed and Slaughter, Quartels, Lies, Pretences, and Arguments, Disorder, Disaster—neighbours to each other— and Oath, who most harms men on eatth, when someone knowingly swears false.

Hesiod creates a catalog of depletions rather than additions, an anticatalog describing the consequences of darkest night. These consequences havea genealogical relation as each is born out of a prior consequence, and he Links them by concatenation and metonymy—the devices of the insomniac’s painful racing mind. The final term is the antithesis of poetic making: the oath “most harms men on earth” because it is intended from the outset as a lie; it cleaves the good faith in language by means of which all reality-making discourse proceeds. False oaths and curses are the deepest expression of human alienation; they mark the return of speaking sub jects to an unintelligible autonomy—the autonomy of the figure receding. back into the darkness, In the daylight battles of the Iliad, Trojans and Greeks ate recognizable by the singularity of their individual armor; their faces are hidden and their identities, like their proper names, which the epic singer goes to such lengths to record, are yoked to the long patrimony of their origins. We see some of the consequences of this obligatory armoring of identity in the encounter between Hector and his baby son Astyanax in Book VI of the Iliad. As Hector reaches to embrace him, Astyanax does not recognize his father: the boy recoiled, cringing against his nurse’ full breast, scteaming out at the sight of his own father, terrified by the flashing bronze, the horschair crest, the great ridge of the helmet nodding, bristling tertor— so it struck his eyes. And his loving father laughed, his mother laughed as well, and glorious Hector, quickly lifting the helmet from his head, set it own on the ground, fiery in the sunlight, and raising his son he kissed him, tossed him in his arms." The audience of the epic cannot forget thereafter the human face of Hec-

tor’s identity beneath his fiery sunlit armor. Whenever a victor strips another's armor, he appropriates the dignity of its symbolism and at the same time breaks into the space of the body, the intimate space of face-toface encounter, to whieh, a8 a killer, he has no rightful claim, The night work of Book X of the Hiad marksa break with the ethies of the rest of the epic action in this regard, The book begins by focusing on one sleepless Greck figure after another: the tide has seemed to turn in faVor of the Trojans and Agamemnon cannot fall asleep, his mind is churning, his groans “wrenching his chest and heaving up from his heart"

Ihe te Daneness (I. 10-11). Menelaus, too, cannot sleep, and the two brothers agree to go.

‘out separately to find companions to check on the steadfastness of the sentries who guard the ships against the nearby Trojans. Agamemnon awakens Nestor, who complains that typically Agamemnon is doing all the work while lazy and cowardly Menelaus hangs back. But Agamemnon assures him that, although that is a fair description of Menelaus, it is in fact his brother's idea to undertake this night-time excursion. The implication is that this action, however bold, will be more fitting of a cowards tactics than the visible declarations of the sunlit field of battle, The Greek leaders gather more men together and find, to their satisfaction, that their sentries are alert, Emboldened by the commitment of their guard, the Greeks decide to ask for a volunteer to penetrate the enemy lines and bring back intelligence of the Trojan plans. Diomedes volunteers and, as

he is allowed to chose a companion, turns to Odysseus to accompany him.

Significantly, the two men are then provided with the arms and armor of others, Odysseus is given a fabulous cap with a gleaming chaplet of the

teeth of a white-tusked boar that in fact comes to him from his own ma-

ternal grandfather through a circuitous route) it has been stolen or borrowed by one warrior after another until this moment when Meriones donates it to him. Master-minded by a coward, conducted by men in the guise of others! arms and armor and under the cloak of night, the events that follow are

in every way atrocious, black with fierceness and cruelty, Diomedes and Odysseus hunt down Dolon, their Trojan victim, like an animal, rather

than confront him, they conceal themselves as he leaves the safety of the Trojan lines. When he has passed, they chase him down wordlessly and

relentlessly, deliberately capturing him alive so that they can press him

for intelligence. Odysseus assures the terrified and talkative Dolon that “Death is [his] last worry” (1, 448). But after Dolon has told them where

and how they can make the most effective raid on the Trojan forces—by

attacking the sleeping Thracian contingent and murdering King Rhesus

with the aim of stealing his fine horses —Diomedes reveals the truth: “if 1 snuff your life out in my hands, / you'll never annoy our Angive lines again” (Il. 521-522). There is no reciprocity in this language of the night. Poor Dolon then receives his second immersion in bad faith. As the Tro-

jan reaches up for the chin of Diomedes to touch his beard in the tradi-

tional gesture of supplication, “Diomedes struck him square across the neck— / a flashing hack of the sword—both tendons snapped / and the shricking head went tumbling in the dust” (l , 25-27). The Grecks then immediately go about stripping of Dolon’s arms and armor and steal to the Thracian camp, where they hack away at the sleeping men, killing the

‘of a spisit seems originally to have been formed from the feeling of the wind, especially at night, and combined with power, and the sound of a voice ‘A. You remind me of the appearance of an apparition in Job. There is form and yer no form; « gentle whisper, a murmuring like the voice af the wind, bur with it also the power of the wind, the energy of the spirit ft raises the hair on end, and rouses all the terrors of the soul ‘y harrows up the soul with fear and wonder."

Given that in the classical tradition darkness is so continuously allied \with bad faith and rupture in communication and that in Genesis creation follows only when the void is dispersed through the creation of intelligible forms, it is not surprising that Christianity places so much emphasis, oon the figure of Christ as a light in the darkness and on the appearance of a word; the voice of the wind becomes a voice, an inspirited presence, in the wind. Christ's form mediates the relation between the divine and human countenance. Yet even the light and word of Christ must be recognized by the faithful in order to be visible and audible. The Fourth Gospel begins with an echo of the opening words 'of Genesis, “In the beginning,” and speaks of light shining in the darkness. This theme is continued in 2 Corinthians 4:6: "For it is the God who said [at the dawn of history), ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ who has shown us our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.” The Jo» hannine “word” summons presence into a world of time. This imperative of recognition is emphasized particularly in the many carols and hymns of Christmas that emphasize awakening, the star of Bethlehem, and the pun on son and sun in the darkness: a traditional Welsh carol tells the story of the wise man “Melchior”: “Dark the night lay, wild and dreary / Moaned the wind by Melehior’s tower, / Sad the sage, while pondering weary / O’er the doom of Judah's power: / When behold, the clouds are parted —/ Westward, lo, alight gleams far!” Robert Herrick’s seventeenthcentury carol says in its second verse, “Dark and dull night, fly hence away, / And give the honour to this day.” Richard Crashaw’s carol from earlier in the same century, “Summer in Winter,” begins, “Gloomy night embraced the place / Where the noble infant lay, / The babe looked up and shewed his face, / In spite of darkness it was day!!! Book 3:1-15 of the Gospel of John draws a parallel between the wise men’s recognition of the infant Christ in darkness and the Pharisce Nicodemus’s capacity to recognize the adult Christ in darkness: “Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. He came to Jesus by night and said to him, ‘Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who

Ire Daseness

hhas come from God and no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.’ Jesus answered him, ‘Very truly, I tell you, no one ean see the kingdom of God without being born from above.’ In the seventeenth-century mystical poet Henry Vaughan's retelling of this en‘counter in his poem “The Night,” a significant transformation is made in the convention of the night as the scene of the dissolution of persons, for Vaughan claims that Nicodemus was able to “know his God by night” since night is in fact a kind of “sacred veil drawn o'er thy [God's] glorious ‘noon,’ For Vauighan, a state of invisibility within the “deep and dazzling darkness” of God's being is far more productive of identity than the mere visibility of the sunlit world of ordinary existence. He concludes, “O for thatnight! where [in him / Might live invisible and dim." Vaughan’s poem is more of an aubade than it is a night work: it depends on an inversion whereby this world with its “ill-guided’' light is completely discounted and the son of God, the light of the world, can be summoned by faith as surely as the sun will rise each morning. Christ's figure mediates and enlightens in every sense both the blank void of the darkness and the face of the human. Darkness remains, here by reversal, the place of error and shattered being where humansare halted from movement and knowledge, In.a state of ignorance, without gnomen in the sense of both riame and past experience, the mind must attempt to forge connections of intelligibility and recognition that will be no less than the grounds for the creation of one’s own consciousness. John Milton, a blind poet counseling a blind hero, w: te powerfully in “Samson Agonistes” of the soul's light in a context of solar eclipse: O dark, dark, da amid the blaze of noon Irvecoverably dark, total eclipse, Withour all hope of day! ‘The sun to me is dark ‘And silent is the moon, When she deserts the night ‘Hid in her vacant interlunar cave Since light so necessary is to life, ‘And almost life itself, if irbe true ‘That light is in the soul, ...

‘These narratives of light in the darkness all record the emergence of the figures and forms of human making from conditions of unintelligibility; they are in this sense narratives of what has had tw precede, of the

king and taking off his team of horses. A war inside a war, Book X of the ‘Hiad illustrates the antinomy of atrocity and recognition. In the darkness

all territory is without bound or name, all lines are crossed, all acts are improvisational in their means and ends, and every death is an animal death.”

In the Hebrew Scriptures, the opening words of Genesis, which are as

well the opening words of the Pentateuch as a whole, establish a relation among light and speech and form that remains paradigmatic for much consequent Western thought about the process of creation: “In the beginring when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a forma wind from God less void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while swept over the face of the waters.” In the Priestly source for the creation account (as opposed to the Yahwist or “J” source, which forms the other principal account}, a technical verb is used to describe God's act of creation (bara). This verb designates an activity confined solely to the divin: ity. It involves no initial material out of which creation proceeds and has no human analogy.!®

‘The Greeks use the term xéojiog—indicating an order, or the world or

universe in its perfect arrangement—to suggest that the universe is a rationally constituted and self-sustaining structure of reality, but the Hebrew Scriptures emphasize the originary power of the Creator, who brings creation out of nothing. The personal relation between Yahweh and his creation is portrayed in the 1" aceount, according to which Yahweh forms ‘man, suggesting the image of a potter molding clay. The Priestly account emphasizes that God created man by means of uttered commands alone.

As in Psalm 33:9, verse 6: “He spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood forth,” Creation by the Word, which is not a sound or concept ‘but an act, event, of verbal expression of sovereignty, became the dominant expression for God's creative labor. Yet of equal importance is the idea that this creation comes out of nothing (2 Mace.

7:28; Rom.

4:17;

Heb. 11:3), Forms of life were created existentially over a formless Abyss and hemmed in by indiscernible waters of chaos. Although Genesis itself 2 portrays an uncreated chaos isnot explicit with regard to this idea, verse 4s the presupposition of God's action, God does not have the qualities ofa demiurge who built the world from raw materials against which he must struggle or whose resistance he must overcome, as he does, for example, in Gnostic thought, Rather, God commands by absolute freedom, the freedom of the word as an effortless divine creation, In such commanding, an invocation is implied, for God not only brings creatures into being; he also designates their specific nature and assigns to them their specific tasks." ‘The beginning here is only imaginable retrospectively, with reference

Terme Dazineys

9

to undisclosed dimensions: al-penei (upon or over) the surfaces of the heavens, the Earth, the deep. Such forms are not immanent in the void of this initial darkness, The wind as the evidence of God's agency is not formed into articulate sounds until it becomes the speech that arises in the next verse: “Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light,”

And after the positing of light there is the differentiation of form that pro-

ceeds as a consequence of evaluation—from the immediate and formless immersion of wind to the discernment of value or particular qualities;

“And God saw that the light was good and God separated the light from the darkness.” Finally, the Creator calls the light Day and the darkness Night, not simply naming these states but also summoning them into a continuing existence, for calling is oriented toward future use and not simply an account of what has happened. Darkness, breath and touch, sound, speech, presentation, discernment of relation, figuration and naming: this

is the sequence of emergence, the sequence of poidsis, that is the pattern of divine creation in the Hebrew Scriptures; it speaks directly to the continuing experience of bringing form out ofa void, The consequent passages

‘on creation—the separation of waters into lower and higher spheres, the

separation of the earth and the seas, the creation of the vegetable world ‘and the stars, the creation of the animals and the birds, the creation of wild and domestic animals, the creation of man in the image of God, the

‘creation of men and women—are

punctuated by the repeated dicta that

evening and morning continue in their cycles and God makes continuous reflective judgments, deciding that what he has made is “good.” Johann Gottfried von Herder's 1782-1783 dialogue, “The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry,” comments on these themes of Genesis at some length and with great incisiveness. His two speakers, Aleiphron and Enthyphron, are a study in contrasts: the naive but enthusiastic perspective of the young Alciphron continually runs against the more considered views of Euthy phron. Their discussion of the creation is framed as an account of the appearance of light in darkness, Euthyphron mentions that, unlike the Greeks, the Hebrews did not speak of a chaos, Rather, “its place was supplied by a dark gloomy sea, upon which the wind of the Almighty was hov‘ering with an agitating effect.” The dialogue continues: Alleiphron]. The spirit, to which you allude, that brooded over the waste and fathomless abyss, is to me peculiarly striking and never fails to inspire me with awe, Eluthyphron}._ It was to the Orientals the first and most natural image of that which constitutes life, power, impulse in creation: for the idea

12

Guamrn One

emergence of, the narrative voice itself. In creating images of divine agents forsuch making, they set fortha space for the appearance of human culture. The Greck word roinace (poidsis), derived from moveiy (poicin), “to make," conveys two kinds of creation: the inspired creation that resembles a godlike power and the difficult material struggle, the réxrn (techné), of making forms out of the resources available. Poetry’s work of creating the figure of the human proceeds by means of imagination and a material engagement with the resources of language; it takes place under a threat of overdetermination (that the Orphic creator might turn back tragically in distrust of himself, inadvertently losing the work through adherence to habit or convention) and a threat of underdetermination (that the freedom of creation could be rooted only in the particular history of the creator, or that the spontaneous and musical effects of the work might overwhelm its capacity to produce a lasting form). What is the relation, then, of poetic making to other form-giving activities? Like all creative acts, poiésis wrests form from nature without prior knowledge of ends or uses. Poiésis thus exaggerates the possibilities of self-transformation available in all forms of work, for its intention cannot be fully known or totalized, The poet discovers his or her identity as a consequence of form making—the role of the maker is not predetermined by either social convention or instrumental reason. The self is obiectified, but not completed, by the presentation of the form. And the form will always be both more and less than a representation of its maker. Poetic form made of language relies on thythm and musical effects that are known with our entire bodies, carried forward by poets working out of tradition and carried over by listeners receiving the work. In addition, poetic form relies on effects of meaning that, in their metaphorical and imaginative reach, cannot he taken up completely in any single moment of reception. The semantic dimension of poetry is an open unfolding one, stemming from both composition and reception, No poetic utterance is absorbed by its context or completed in its use; as an enduring form, transmutable and transportable across contexts, the poem is always manifold. Paradoxically, it is the close of artworks that enables the unending open task of such reception. What is this unending task? It is the task of recognition in the light of the other, for every work of poiésis anticipates and is completed by practices of reception. The poet intends toward another, even if the other is the poet apprehending the work in a later time and other space. Because that intention proceeds in time, the objectification of the other is also subject to transformation. Hence, in lyric poetry, especially, the presentation of face-toface communication is always triangulated. The poet speaks to another in

such a way as to make the communication intelligible to more than one person. The communication is not simply intimate: it is constitutive of the social, mutual, intersubjective ground of intimacy itself.” It is the kind of thing one knows that others say when they are face-to-face. The great transformation in Greek drama from the presentation of dithyram bic choruses to Aeschylus’s introduction of a second actor, enabling a conflict of wills and hence inviting judgment and closure from a third posi tion—that of the audience —grows out of the cultural work of lyric: the work of individuation under intersubjective terms, Perhaps no one has described the historical work of poiésis as a process of anthropomorphization more vividly than the great early cighteenthcentury Neapolitan jurist, rhetorician, and philosopher of history Giambattista Vico. Vico’s major treatise, The New Science (1744), is rooted in a retrospective myth about the origins of poetry that also links poiésis to an originary anxiety about the absence of form. Here is the story as Vico tells it: [Wjhen ... at last the sky fearfully rolled with thunder and flashed with lightning, a8 could not but follow from the bursting upon the ais for the frst time of an impression so violent. Thereupon a few giants, who must hhave been the most robust, and who were dispersed through the forests ‘on the mountain heights where the strongest heasts have their dens, were frightened and astonished by the great etfect whose cause they did not know, and raised their eyes and became aware of the sky. And because in such a case the nature of the human mind leads it to attribute its own na ture to che effect and because in that state thetr nature was thatof men all robust bodily strength, who expressed their very violent passions by shouting and grumbling, they pictured the sky to themselves as a great “animated body, which in that aspect they called Jove, the first god of the so-called greater gentes [peoples], who meant to tell them something by the hiss of his bolts and the clap of his thunder. And thus they began to ‘exercise that natural curiosity which is the daughter of ignorance and the mother of knowledge, and which, opening the mind of man, gives bith to wonder.!”

In this account of how the earliest humans, living naked in the forest,

a figure by means of which they could bear their fear of the most invented

powerful forces of nature, Vico conjectures that early peoples “created

things according to their own ideas.” He goes on to explain how “this {human] creation was infinitely different from that of God. For God, in his purest intelligence, knows things, and, by knowing them, creates them

but they, in their robust ignorance, did it by virtue of a'wholly corporeal imagination, And because it was quite corporeal, they did it with martelous sublimity; a sublimity such and so great that it excessively perturbed the very persons who by imagining did the creating, for which they were called ‘poet/ which is Greek for ‘creators.’ "* Vico explains that the imagination stems from the bodily or “corporeal” senses and is moved to represent itself by anthropomorphizing nature and by giving being to inan. imate things: Fashioned from nature as Jove is fashioned by the first humans from their experience of lightning, these “inventions” eventually become narratives.” And as narratives harden into ideologies, Vico eontends that authorization and legitimation give such ideologies ethical force. In Vico’s thought, poetry serves human ends in the expression of the corporeal senses, in the imaginative reconfiguration of nature through such devices as onomatopoeia, personification, and other modes of projection, and as the coordination of various modes of temporal experience necessarily preceding any narrative forms. Following Vico, one could claim that poetry cannot be the subject of history, for poetry is necessarily prior to history. Poetry expresses the passage from not-knowing to knowing through which we represent the world, including the perspectives of oth ers, to ourselves and those around us. What is given birth, as "the daughter of ignorance” becomes “the mother of knowledge,” is human history —the continuity of a continuously transforming human culture Vico’s interests lie in the direction of a broad and comprehensive theory of the rise and fall of nations as social institutions: their origin, ruin, and revival—his ricors under which the internal stresses of social sysn Buc for and rebirth. constant dissolutio of tems compel them to processes our purposes the central place of poetic thought in his theory is paramount, In Vico's own introduction to his New Science he explains: "We and of letters lies find that the principle of these origins both of languages in the fact that the early gentile peoples, by a demonstrated necessity of nature, were poets who spoke in poetic characters. This discovery, which is the master key of this Science, has cost us the persistent research of almost all our literary life, because with our civilized natures we {moderns} ¢annot at all imagine and can understand only by great toil the poetic nature of these first men, ... Now the sources of all poetic locution are two: poverty of language and the need to explain and be understood." *® Language here ts pressured to be in some way commensurate to sense experience and at the same time to be intelligible to others. In Vico's theory the speaking subject as the recipientof the recognition of others is not prior to language: language is the forum within which such a speaking

INTHE DARENESS

15

subject emerges, Only when poctic metaphors make available to others the experience of the corporeal senses can the corporeal senses truly appear as integral experiences. The self and here again the paradigm is the self lost in absolute darkness} is compelled to make forms—ineluding the forms of persons striving to represent their corporeal imaginations to othxs. This is the situation of the person spoken by sound who becomes the person speaking—the cry of the senses coming forward beyond will is transformed into the person of volition and consequence, thus necessarily 4 person articulated by speaking and being spoken to. To put it another way, it is the situation of the emergence of subjectivity bath ontologically—that is, in general—and historically —that is, in particular. But the reconciliation of this model as a structural problem and a historical practice is not a simple one. Like Hegel's account of the ontology of consciousness, Vico’s narrative of the origins af poetry and subjectivity is a retrospective fable about our capacity for the fabular. Poetry is both the repetition of an ontological moment and the ongoing process or work of enunciation by which that moment is recursively known and carried forward For a later thinker such as Friedrich von Schiller, the tensions and interrelations between the senses and abstraction, or what he called the “formal” drive; achieve their most harmonious balance in art making and the capacity we have for play more generally.* In the twelfth of his “Let ters on the Aesthetic Education of Man,” Schiller suggests that through art we are able both to give reality to the necessityof sensuous experience and to bring a diversity of manifestations into harmony, The creation of form is linked to the articulation and affirmation of the individual person in his or her whole humanity: “When therefore the formal impulse holds sway and the pure object acts within us, there is the highest expansion of being, all barriers disappear, and from being the unit of magnitude to which the needy sense confined him, Man has risen to a unit of idea embracing the whole realm of phenomena, By this operation we are no more in time, but time, with its complete and infinite succession, is in us. We re no longer individuals, but species.” For Schiller, the experience of aesthetic beauty is in this way a means of renewal for individuals and for human life as a whole, Describing how man’s humanity constantly is re duced by entering into determinate conditions —conditions of limit posed by our meetings with forces of nature and history—Schiller writes in his twenty-first letter of the aesthetic as a replenishing counterforce to such determinations: “he [man] possesses this humanity as a predisposition, before any definite condition into which he may come; but in actual prac: tice he loses it with every definite condition into which he comes, and it

must, if he is to be able to make the transition to an opposite condition, be newly restored to him every time by means of the aesthetic life.” Schiller concludes, “It is, then, no mere poetic licence, but also philosophical truth, to call Beauty our second creator.” Whereas Vico took as his task a retrospective explanation for the rise and fall of cultures and Schiller pursued the possibilities for human freedom that arise as sense experience is transformed into the forms of art, Karl Mars viewed the senses themselves as a historical accomplishment of human labor and asked what utopian potential might lie in the development of the senses once they were yoked to genuine human needs. Writing in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, the young ‘Marx considered the relations between sense experience and the production of individuality in more specifically historical terms. Arguing against false forms of communism that would involve the sharing of women communally as the "spoills} and handmaidls} of communal lust,” Marx contends that only when relations between persons are “direct and natural species-relations,” relations in which what is natural and sensuous in ‘one’s existence is in the interest not merely of individual consumption but also of the ongoing articulation of what are human needs, can any true transcendence of private property prevail. Otherwise the “sharing” characterizing such inauthentic communism is merely a reification of property—in this case, the reification of other persons as property and the abuse of orher persons to satisty individual greed." ‘As Immanuel Kant's argument for “purposive purposelessness” in the “Analytic of the Beautiful”** is the force behind much of Schiller’s arguments on aesthetic experience as an avenue to intellectual freedom, so is it an influence here. For Marx suggests that only when our relation to our senses and to other persons is motivated by a desire to participate in the ongoing articulation of such human needs, and not by a desire to use out experience and our encounters with others as means to predetermined and instrumental ends, can we be fully human. In a remarkable aphorism amid these passages on the senses and human needs, Marx writes, “The forming of the five senses is 4 labour of the entite history af the world down to the present," The radlical innovation Marx provides here is his genuinely historical sense of the formation of the senses, He emphasizes the “forming” of the senses as a human accomplishment, in their inchoate form, sense experiences are continuous with animal life. At this level, we ate caught in the dark and unending negation of night as Hegel described it. It is only in the objectification of sense experiences, the objectification that in aesthetic activity is not yoked to predetermined ends, that we acquire

Ih THEDamexess

17

our humanity. Marx writes, “All history is the history of preparing and de-

veloping ‘man’ to become the object of sensuous consciousness, and tuming the requirements of ‘man as man’ into his needs.” In contrast to the inauthentic and estranged needs of mere “having” under the reign of pri vate property and the endlessly redistributed goods of inauthentic forms of communism that remain based on a foundation of individual greed, true sense perception “exists as human sensuousness for one’s self through the other man."*" For Marx, the social aspect of the use of the senses is what ‘makes it human, And, perhaps most significant, such sense experiences

formed under an imperative of intelligibility to others help us form our-

selves as individual persons: “it is only when the objective world becomes everywhere for man in society the world of man’s essential powers—hu. man reality, and for that reason the reality of his own essential powers—

that all objects become for him

the objectification of himself, become ob-

jects which confirm and realise his individuality, become his objects: that is, man himself becomes the object." IL

LauGuter, Weerinc, AND THE Ope oF THE SENSES

How can it he said that the senses are made by means of a historical pro. cess? Since ancient times, the senses have often been considered as a philosophical problem appearing on a boundary between what we refer to, perhaps for lack of better terms, as internal and external phenomena. The relation between external objects—that is, material forms and living or. ganisms—and the objects of our immediate awareness of the world— color, shape, sound, smell, tactile feelings—can be both distinguished and blurred. Visual and auditory senses depend on relations to external objects and their properties, and hence propinquity and distance are central 0 their experience; sounds and smells are public and external, tastes are pri vate yet external to the skin and membranes in that they require stimula. tion, feelings of heat, cold, warmth, and other tactile properties are partly internal and partly dependent on contact with external forms; proprioception arises from internal properties of the body in orientation to external

space. Philosophers have offered various descriptions of sense experience: John Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), spoke ‘of “ideas of sense.” In the early eighteenth century, Bishop George Berke: ley wrote in A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge {1710, Pare 1) and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713)

1h

Chanin One

of “sensible qualities” that are not independent of the mind, and David

‘Hume wrote in his 1739 Treatise of Human Nature of “impressions” in-

ferred from empirical experience out of which all ideas are derived. Gilbert Ryle (The Concept of Mind,

1949) and J. L. Austin |Sense and Sensibilia,

1962) claimed that speaking of sense data as phenomena reified the per-

ceived qualities of things. Such philosophical work on the senses con-

stantly returns to a et of questions regarding the relations between sense

experience and the expression of sense experience. When do sense impressions require external stimulants? What is the status of a hallucina-

tion of dream of sense experience! Are our sense impressions private or

more or less public? In talking of an object's qualities, do we form an object’s qualities?

Through work, play, sex, grooming, and other activities, we use our bodies to address the natural world with an ongoing mutuality: The senses

cluster and work at the openings of the body; through them, we engage in.

an epistemology of process that is specific to parts of the body and yet evidently endlessly synesthetic and generalizable, leading to knowledge of

exterior forms. Louise Vinge’s important historical survey of the theme of

the five senses in literature and visual art’ emphasizes the changing frame

of this dynamic between exterior and interior, the senses on the one hand

and the reason or the soul on the other. Plato argues in the “Theaetetus” that much knowledge—for example, knowledge of values—is independent of sense impressions and that sense impressions in themselves are not forms of knowledge.

Philo, Cicero, and Lactantius all present, by var-

fous means, images of man that claim the head as the seat of reason, the head serves as a kind of citadel, protecting the self against the onslaught

‘of experience. The senses in this lacer classical tradition sometimes appear in turn as watchmen or sentinels in relation to the external world.” Medieval writers such as Hugh of St. Vietor in the eleventh century, Alain de Lille in the twelfth century, Jacopone da Todi in the thirteenth century, and Jean Gerson in the fourteenth century wrote allegorical and moralizing works on the theme of the five senses. These works are often directly negative in their presentation of sense impressions-—impressions, accord-

ing to these writers in the line of Plato's thought, inevitably hostile to rea~ son.” Renaissance thinkers, particularly neo-Platonists such as Marsilio

Ficino, revive a positive interest in the senses, particularly by claiming that the senses give us access to beauty. But the negative allegory of siege continues in texts like the House of Alma episode in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. As an embodiment of the castle of the soul, Alma is threatened by bestial attacks on her senses. Spenser borrows an iconography from emblem books like those of Cesare Ripa linking animals with

De TWE DARKNESS

19

certain sense impressions: owls and lynxes with sight, harts and boars

‘with hearing; dogs, apes, and vultures with smell, ostriches, toads, and swine with taste; snails, hedgehogs, and spiders with touch. Spenser's story recounts how these animals are assembled in a menagerie dedicated to breaking down the defenses of virtue, In medieval and Renaissance topoi overall, the domain of smell, touch, and taste is properly a domain ‘of beasts. This thetoric of the animal and servile senses, aside from its obvious legitimating force for philosophical abstraction, establishes a subjectivity separated from nature, protected by mediation, and propelled by

adesire born out of the very estranged relation thus created As Philo is at

pains to explain in his discussion of the Pentapolis, of all the monuments of the cities on the plain, only the citadel of sight was left standing.» Later Elizabethan and Baroque erotic poetry, as we shall see, often plays on Petrarchan idealizations of sight and hearing and at the same time makes

witty, satirical use of the lower senses of taste, smell, and touch,

‘Something of these ascetic notions regarding the senses survived in

Sigmund Freud's thought. In Instincts and Their Vieissitudes, for example, Freud describes the nervous system as an apparatus that has the function of getting rid of the stimuli that reach it, or at least reducing them to the lowest level.!® But he was limited by his paradigm, derived from the experiences of adulthood, when he associated pleasure predominantly with the relief of tension, Subsequent work in psychology and the study of human development suggests that from infancy human beings find some sensory stimuli attractive and pleasant and others repellent and that such sensations are felt within the organism prior to the development

of distinctions between subjects and objects. The path of development is toward more and more articulation of interior and exterior states, but that

development is propelled by what seems to be an intrinsic pleasure in

stimulation and articulation —all leading to the ability to be interested in

objects themselves." If this argument about the role of objectification in sense perception is one of the oldest in Western thought, itis also one of the newest, Antonio

R. Damasio’s recent pathbreaking study of the role of body and emotion in.

the “making of consciousness" concludes, on the basis of his extensive neurological research, that consciousness should be seen "in terms of two players, the organism and the object and in terms of the relationship between the two, . . . Consciousness consists of constructing knowledge about two facts: that the organism is involved in relation to some object and that the object in the relation is causing a change in the organism.” Damasio’s studies come directly out of the Aristotelian position:

“con-

sciousness hegins as the fecling of what happens when we see or hear or

touch. Phrased in slightly more precise words, itis a feeling that accompanies the making of any kind of image—visual, auditory, tactile, visceral—within our living organisms."* The difference between a “core consciousness, relying simply on such sense formations, and what Damasio calls “knowledge consciousness,” whose highest form is an “autobiographical consciousness,” 1s that only the latter involves knowing one has constructed sense images, This knowledge is “autobiographical” in that it can be “stored in the memory, categorized in conceptual or linguistic terms, and retrieved in recall or recognition modes." According to Damasio, out of a “proto-self™ that represents sense impressions to the organism on a moment-to-moment basis and the eventual emergence of multiple levels of the brain prior to, and without, consciousness, consciousness gradually emerges. An object modifies the proto-self, and knowledge of such modification ensues: the autobiograph{cal self is based on implicit memoriesof individual experience in the past and anticipation of the future; memories can he made explicit, and when they are activated, they appear as "something to be knawn.’”"” From protoself to autobiographical self, there is an increase in cognitive complexity and in the reach of consciousness toward oth the past and the future, In these wavs, consciousness opens time beyond the moment-to-moment representation of physical states—the “here and now,” the “this”-ness of the Hegelian dark, expands into the past and future of the continuous self. The philosophical problem of the senses, in that it has emphasized the status of sensory experience in relation to varying historical models of the real, has from the beginning appeared, as Damasio implies, as a moral problem—a problem of the status of human experience and human conduct, with experience and conduct forming contrasting poles of passive and active agency, as the past is known and the future anticipated. The notion of “five senses” usually is attributed to Aristotle, although wwe find that, in De Anima, taste and seeing ean be forms of touch. Here the senses are connected to the elements in a system of correspondences. The eye is associated with water, which can absorb light; hearing is associated with air; smell with fire; and touch with earth. Aristotle makes special mention of objects that are perceptible by single senses —coloras the special object of sight, sound of hearing, flavor of taste.%* This specialization and heightening of the senses plays in complex ways into later discourses on the senses: the notions of sensibility and sensitivity associated with the refining of the higher philosophical senses of seeing and hearing; the complexity of taste as a distinction ranging from coarseness to fineness—a set of terms so textural in its range that reaches back to the Aristotelian merger of taste and touchy and, correlatively, the problems of

Ww ie Daneness

21

overrefined sensibilities of touch and smell—by the time of Freud linked

to regression, neuroses, and even perversion.”

Accompanying this concern with specialized functions, Aristotle also

put forward a theory of synaesthesia. “There seems to be a sort of paral

Ielism,” he notes, “between what is acute or grave to hearing and what is sharp or blunt to touch, what is sharp as it were stabs, while what is blunt

pushes, the one producing its effort in a short, the other in a long time, so.

that one is quick, the other slow.” In Aristotle's doctrine the information provided by the external senses reached the internal senses by means of « common sense of touch.” For Aristotle touch (and thereby taste} is found in all animals and so is the lowliest sense. He contends that this is the sense needed for being, whereas the other senses are necessary for wellbeing.*! He therefore poses a hierarchical order of the senses, from most to least valuable: vision-hearing-smell-taste-touch. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle also develops an opposition between Heroic Virtue and

sensual pleasure; the latter, when based on appetite, is “brutish” for “it attaches to us not as men but as animals." Pliny famously contends in his Natural History that touch and taste are superiorin man to the senses of animals but that in all the other senses man is surpassed: “Eagles have clearer sight, vultures a keener sense of smell, moles acuter hearing—although they are buried in the earth, so dense and deaf an element of nature, and although moreover all sound travels upward, they can overhear people talking and it is actually said that if you speak about them they understand and run away."

But Pliny,

isan exception as he cites what traditionally have been considered animal senses (touch and taste) in humans and, in addition to smell, what traditionally have been considered human senses (seeing, hearing) in animals,

‘More conventionally, the senses have been ranked in relation to their de-

gree of immediacy, the hierarchy proposed by Aristotle: taste and touch, in direct contact with the world, are lowest; followed by smell, which forms a kind of mean distance to sight and hearing, which operate across

distance yet can be called to mind without external stimulation. Sight and

hearing, because of their link with philosophical contemplation and abstraction, hold the leading place. ‘The subject invented by disinterested desire presents an ideal picture

of evolved, upright human being—vision and hearing directed toward

the horizon and hence a spatialization of progress and self-consciousness. Taxonomy here is inextricably bound up with hierarchy: the partitioning of classes and cultures and the partitioning of the body itself, Such taxonomies assume that our human relation to the animal is a metaphorical, allegorical one and not a metonymic, contiguous one. In excess and

deprivation, the economy of the senses is thereby created and regulated, Yet in thinking about the regulation of the senses, it is useful to make a rudimentary distinction between taboo and manners, We might see taboo as structural, encompassing a prohibition against the sign as well as against the referent. Hence the deep, naturalized status of taboo. We refuse to speak of the taboo and in this way keep it in the domain of the invisible. The taboos against the exerescenees of the body, for example—menstrual blood, vomit, spittle, hair, dandruff, nail parings, semen, excrement, uurine—appear in the West as total taboos. All five senses are closed to them, with the most animal senses, touch and taste, receiving the highest prohibition, Of course, they must not be uttered as names—and their names themselves are generalized, as are their few euphemisms. Disgust as the far register of pleasure, disgust experienced physically and not through language, however, is readily transformed into disgust as the pleasure of resistance, temptation, and fetishism: the body's system of closings and openings becomes articulated as itis exercised. Hence the residual famiiliarity of the tabooed substances and the private as the proper site for their management, As William James obscrved, we feel a slight disgust when sitting down in a chair warmed by a stranger, as wellas slight pleasuite in sitting down in a chair that we ourselves have warmed." Taboo, once spoken, becomes imere manners: emergent, codified, uttered, and transformable. In his history of manners, Norbert Elias emphasizes that manners function as.a way of negotiating the boundary between the animal and the human and the boundary between classes. The maintenance of these boundaries, he contends, depends on the increased tendency, from the late Middle Ages forward, of people to observe themselves and others. The notion of how to look, bath actively and passively, is a matter of both intention and reception. Erasmus writes, for example, of the separation of the body from the animal: “some put their hands into the dishes when they are scarcely seated. Wolves and ghuttons do that”; and of the separation of one class from another: It is most refined to use only three fingers of the hands. This is one of the marks of distinction between the upper and lower classes.” Such exercises of seli-control, the elaborate semiotic of constraints and gestures, reshape the senses under the contingencies of the social code. They also, notes Elias, allow the state to exercise a monopoly on physical force —gestures of self-suppression are gestures of membership and self-surveillance.!* The pattern of manners in fifteenth-century courtesy books such as The Babbees Book and The Boke of Precedence is one of separating eating and speech, We might view the characters of Rabelais, who eat with theit ‘mouths full (Gargantua mouthing prayers when stuffed, Panurge’s taste

Wie Damewess

24

fora mass moistened with wine), as evidence of the flauntingof this rule. Lord Chestertield's description to his son, sent in a letter in 1741, of the quintessential “awkward person” might serve as the prototype for a particularly adolescent slapstick humor regarding this theme When an awkward fellow frst comes into @ oom, itis highly probable ‘that his sword gets between his legs, and throws him down, or makes him stumble at least, when he has recovered this aceident, he goes and places ‘himself in the very place of the whole room where he should not, there hhe soom lets his hat fall down, and, taking it up again, throws down his ‘cane; in recovering his cane, his hat falls a second time; so that he is a ‘quarter of an hous before he is in order again, If he drinks tea or coffee, he certainly scalds his mouth, and lets either the cup or the saucer fal, and spills the tea or coffce in his breeches. At dinner his awkwardness distinstuishes itself particularly, as he has more to do: there he holds his knife, fork, and spoon differently from other people; eats with his knife to the ‘reat danger of his mouth, picks his teeth with his fork, and puts his ‘spoon, which has been in his throat twenty times, into the dishes again *

It is not surprising that the father next warns the boy against awkwardness in words and expression, ‘The prohibition against putting objects in the mouth argues for the enduring regulation of this organ of both sexual and social contact.*” In Thomas Hardy's 1872 novel Under the Greenwood Tree, a work to which wwe will return later in a more specific discussion of Hardy's poems, there is an intriguing scene on this theme, Members of the “Mellstock quire,” the local parish's male singing group, are talking about one of their oldest members, William Dewey, concluding that “he'd starve to death for mu-

sic's sake now, as much as when he was a boy-chap of fifteen,” But Michael Mail, another singer, replies that in fact “there's a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating."” He recounts how once in an inn he was having dinner when a brass band struck up on the street outside:

“Such a beautiful band as that were! | was setting eating fried liver and lights, 1 well can mind—ah, I was! and to save my life, ! couldn't help

chewing to the time. Band played six-cight time, six-eight chews J, willy-

nilly. Band plays common; common time went my teeth among the liver and lights,” Mrs. Dewey responds that she doesn’t like “Michael's tuneful stories. They are quite coarse to a person of decent taste." Consider, as well, the neoclassical anxiety regarding laughter. Although traces of this prejudice appear in Torquato Tasso’s description of the Fountain of Laughter associated with Armida and in the Acrasia epi-

24

Cmmpren One

sode of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, it is the neoclassical prohibition against excess that results in a number of works specifically designed to inhibit laughter.” Anthony, carl of Shaftesbury, who otherwise |was an important advocate of the comicas a correction to pedantry, quotes Ecclesiastes 21:20 with approval in his Regimen (1698-1712): “A fool lifteth up his voice with laughter, but-a wise man doth scarce smile a is much more frequent among little,” He contends that outright laughter “porters, carmen, and clowns” than among well-bred people.** William Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty (1753} similarly states that “the expression ‘of excessive laughter more often than any other, givesa sensible face a silly or disagreeable look, as it is apt to form regular plain lines about the mouth, like a parenthesis, which sometimes appears like erying."** Indeed, weeping comes under similar rules of prohibition. The interdiction is not against laughteror weeping per se so much as the excessive and unmeasured flow of expression out of the face: unbidden tears and explosive laughter involve a loss of volition. A striking account of this fear of the lability between laughter and liquidity is T, S, Eliot’s prose poem “Hysteria,” from his 1917 volume Prufrock and Other Observations, Eliot begins the poem by describing & woman’s mouth as a kind of entrance to hell: "As she laughed [ was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-dril, Iwas drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles.”** This poem gives us a far clearer notion of the perils of laughter than any courtesy book interdiction might provide, The speaker fears being actually engulfed, inhaled by this open laughing mouth with its animated teeth, As the poem continues, an elderly waiter’s nervous repetitions give the speaker an objective correlative for his fear. But itis the elderly waiter ‘who shows the primary symptom of hysteria—his insistent repetitions thwarting all sense of purpose or direction. The waiter wants to displace the laughter to the garden where its effects might be less concentrated The speaker will cure the problem by removing the source, what feeds the hysteria now that it is exposed to view is described as “the shaking of her breasts”—a shaking the speaker resolves to stop. Laughter, like weeping and other unintended flows of liquidity from the body, is particularly dangerous when it is expressed idiosyncratically, when it is not taken up socially and yet threatens to contaminate whatever lies within its range. Weeping or crying conventions also are often, as is “Hysteria” the poem, specifically gendered. George Puttenham writes in a chapter of his 1589 The Arte of English Poesie:

Here Danewtss

25

{Glenerally to weepe for any sorrow (as one may doe for pitie} is not so decent in a man: and therefore all high minded persons, when they cannot cchuse but shed teares, wil turne away their face as a countenance unde ‘cent for 4 man to shew, and so will the standers by till they have supprest ‘uch passion, thinking it nothing decent to behold such an uncomely ‘countenance. Rut for Ladies and women to weepe and shed teares at every little greefe, itis nothing uncomely, but rather a signe of much good na ture and meeknes of minde, a most decent propertie for that sexe; and therefore they be for the more part more devout and charitable, and greater gevers of almes than men, and zealous relievers of prisoners, and beseechers of pardons, and such like parts of commiseration. Yea they be ‘more than so 09° for by the common proverbe, a woman will weepe for pitie to see a gosling gne barefoote.*

Despite Puttenham’s light tone, women’s weeping has a long Western cultural history embedded in mourning practices, and it is their weeping, that moves the inarticulate cries of the grieving into intersubjective speech, placing the dead in memory as the body is buried in the easth. In Ireland, for example, women deliver first the death wail, the ullagone, and then the keen that describes the life and achievements of the dead figure, There is, in their death work, a recapitulation or representation of the birth work that moves from crying into achieved form: the mother’s cries in labor end in song and speech to the newborn baby; the baby’s own first ery marks its entry into the world and the socialization language will bring. Steven Feld's studies, beginning in the 1970s, of Kaluli weeping and song present a subtle analysis of the gendering of weeping within one cultural system, In Kaluli society, women are given the “task” of weeping, and men are given the task of creating songs that move others to burst into wailing or tears, Feld explains: "The western ethnopsychological link between women, emotion, and irrationality is clearly not shared by Kaluli. . For Kaluli, men are far more typically and stereotypically cul turally constructed as the emotional gender, the more unpredictable, potentially irrational, the more moody, prone to burst out in tears at any moment, or become flamboyantly seized with tantrums of rage or sadness. Kaluli men seem to have more trouble controlling anger and upset than do Kaluli women . . . women's crying is more melodic, texted, controlled, re~ flective and sustained,” ** Although in this passage Feld is drawing a dis. tinction between Wester and Kaluli ways of expressing emotion, it is ‘clear that there is also a parallel structure: it is women who are given the license of socially structured, what might be called “formal,” weeping. If,

26

Cure one

as Puttenham suggests, men are not to weep atall, asa consequence men’s weeping is likely to appear as the return of the repressed —as unexpected, unlawful outburst Thave taken this rather long detour on the regulation of the senses to provide a context for poetry's appearance in culture: the transformation of sense experience into words, the mark of the human, is implicit in the ad. jon we constantly give to overwrought children: “Use words.” As emotional expression, poetry is subject to social rules in complex ways. Erotic and rhetorical at once, replete with irrational rhythms and compulsions to repeat, emerging through the mouth in face-to-face encounters that ate also imitations and re-cteations of others’ speech and gestures, poetry is embedded in cultural systems of decorum and sensual regulation and at the same time has its own sphere of constraints, expectations, and permissions. Puttenham’s Arte devotes an entire chapter ta “Of decencie in behaviour which also belongs to the consideration of the Poet ot maker" ‘And there is a deceney to be observed in every mans action and behaviour aswell as in his speach and writing whick soe peradventute would thinke impertinent to be treated of in this booke, where we do but informe the commendable fashions of language and stile: but that is otherwise, for the good maker or poet who is in decent speach and good termes to desscribe all things and with prayse or dispraise to report every mans behaviour, ought to know the eomelinesse of an action aswell as of a word and thereby todirect himselfe both in praise and perswasion or any boeher point that perteites to the Oratours arte.

Puttenham prescribes acceptable behaviors between rich and poor persons

and between wise and foolish ones, discourses at table and in public as-

sembly and in private, forms of decent apparel and grooming, balance in gift giving, proper carriage and movement, and, as we have seen, the proper expression of the passions, weeping, and laughter. He concludes that “all

your figures Poeticall or Rhethoricall, are but observations of strange speeches, and such as without any arte at al we should use, and commonly

do, even by very nature without discipline. But more or lesse aptly and de-

cently, or scarecly, or aboundantly, or of this or that kind of figure, and one of us more then another, according to the disposition of our nature, con-

stitution of the heart, and facilitie of each mans utterance: #0 as we may conclude, that nature her selfe suggesteth the figure in this or that forme; but arte aydeth the judgement of his use and application.”*” The regula-

tion of the senses, of mouth and speech, is completely bound up with pro-

TutWeDaReNtss

27

cesses of social decorum: with who may do and say what in the presence ‘or absence of whom on what occasions. The notion of poetic kinds is tied to the specificity of their use and occasion: the epithalamion, the elegy, the aubade are at once works of art independent of their particular contexts of production and use and social acts tied to specific rules of decorum, Poems are in this sense acts of social intent and consequence and not things ina world of things If we look at some of the relatively rare poems in the English tradition that focus on the “lower” senses of taste and smell, we find in fact that they continually play on the absent situation of writing and the conceit of the speaker's presence in a scene to which the reader has no access. Such poems therefore make a special use of lyric’s triangulation of speaker, addressee, and reader, in this case, the inherent voyeurism of the reader's position is all the more emphasized by the focus on these nonvisual senses so embedded in proximity. And not surprisingly, such poems almost always are erotic—even when they express what might be called an erotic sense of repulsion, They often display the irreverent attitude sixteenthcentury and later poets came to hold toward Petrarchan conventions.™ Yet while such poems may mock the conventions of sonnet comparisons, they also contribute to our understanding of the sensual realism of erotic forces of attraction and aversion. Compare, for example, the bland sweetness of these lines from Sonnet 64 of Edmund Spenser's “Amoretti”: Het lips did smell lyke unto Gillyflowern her ruddy cheekes lyke unto Roses red her snowy browes lyke budded Bel heer lovely eyes lyke Pincks hut newly spred. Her goodly bosome Iyke a Strawberry bed, her neck Iyke to a bounch of Cullambynes, her brest Iyke lillyes, ere theyr leaves he shed, hher nipples lyke yong blossom Jessem Such fragrant flowses doe give most odorous smell, but her sweet odour did them all excell” to these lines out of the relentlessly negative structure of John Donne's Elegy 8, "The Comparison” As the sweet sweat of roses in a still, ‘As that which from chafed tusk cat's pores doth tail, ‘As the almighty balm of th‘early cast, Such as the sweat drops of my mistress’ breast.

25

Cuartmn Ont ‘And on her neck her skin such lustre sets, They seem no sweat drops, but peatl carcanets. Rank sweaty froth thy mistress! brow defiles, Like spermatic issue of ripe menstruous boils, Or like that scum, which, by needs Lawless law Enforced, Sanserra’s starved men did draw Prom parboiled shoes, and boots, and all the rest Where were with any sovereign fatness blessed, Ang like vile lying stones in saffroned tin, Or warts, or weals; they hang upon her skin. r hy breast| like worm-eaten trunks, clothed in seal's skin, Or grave, thav’s dust without, and stink within, And like a bunch of ragged eartots stand ‘The shore swoll'n fingers of thy xouty hand, ‘Are not your kisses then as filthy, and more, ‘Asa worm sucking an envenomed sore? Doth not thy fearful hand in feeling quake, ‘As ne which gathering flowers, sill fears a snake? Isnot your last act harsh, and violent, ‘As when a plough a stony ground doth rent?

Donne's poem ends, “She, and comparisons are odious," Like the camplex discourses on odor in William Shakespeare's Sonnets 54 ("O, how much more doth beauty beauteous seem") and 69 "Those parts of thee that the world’s eye doth view" Donne's elegies go beyond the simple formulas of comparison as a model of positive attraction and negative repulsion, Here repulsion, in its elaborate detail, borders on fascination. A kind af trompe l'oeil effect is created wherein what seem to be fixed visttal images melt into deeay, releasing their odors before our very eyes ifnot our ‘very noses, Such an effect is a verbal analogue for the vanitas motif of the insistent skull that plays such an important role in works like Hans Holbein’s anamorphic “The Ambassadors” and indeed throughout Renaissance painting. The flecting lives of flowers, the fleetingnessof smells and tastes, are resources for driving home the ephemerality of life's pleasures and the inevitability of death, Donne's Elegy 4, “The Perfume,” is a kind of bawdy detective story that ends darkly with this vanitas theme. In this elegy the lovers make elaborate precautions to keep their meetings secret from the rest of the household, but the man is given away to the woman's father by his perfume: “Had it been some bad smell, he would have thought / that his own

HTML Daneniss

29

feet, or breath, that smell had wrought.” The elegy closes with an apostrophe to perfume itself Only, thou bitter sweet, whom I had laid Next me, me traitorously hast hetrayed. ‘And unsuspected hast invisibly At once fled unto him, and stayed with me, ace excrement of earth, which dost confound Sense, from distinguishing the sick from sound, By thee the silly amorous sucks his death by drawing in a leprous harlot’s breath; By thee, the greatest stain to man’s estate Falls on us, to be called effeminate; ‘Though you be much loved in the prince's hall, ‘There, things that seem, exceed substantial Gods, when ye fumed on altars, were pleased well, Recause you were burnt not that they liked your smell All my perfumes, I give most willingly ‘To embalm thy father’s corse; What? will he die?

Donne’s erotic poems are often brilliant plays on the voyeuristic inclinations and absent presence of his readers. In the elaborate striptease of Elegy 19, “To His Mistress Going to Bed,” the speaker imploringly and

systematically asks his mistress to take off her clothes and then tricks the reader by revealing in the last two lines that he, too, by now is naked—reminding us quite vividly that we have only been in the scene through his

control of the perspective all along:

cast all, yea, this white linen hens Here is no penance, much less innocence ‘To each thee, 1am naked frst, why then, What necdst thou have more covering than 2 man It is not surprising that the satirical poetry of the “lower senses’ thrives in the period when seribal publication is still flourishing, a viable alternative even as the resources of printing ate being fully developed. Donne is, according to the foremost authority on scribal publication, Harold Love, “committed to manuscript.” Love draws an insightful comparison between Spenser, whose didactic Puritanism and nationalistic fer

vor are readily displayed by the march of regular printed columns of verse,

and Donne, whose meandering catachresti¢ poetry “follows the requirements of the thought,” without consideration for visual effect, Donne's use of erotic triangulation is well served by the palpability of scribal texts—they bear the presence of a human hand tracing a human voice and can be read by a third party in an atmosphere of intimate proximity. When Donne emphatically begins “The Canonization,” “For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love,” the convention of immediacy in scribal publication enables his address cleverly to command both the racket of third persons occupying his “private” erotic space and the protesting words of the lover being implored to “let him love,” the unobservable and inaudible accompaniment to the rest of the poem. Love discusses John Dryden, born in the year of Donne’s death, as another poet who used scribal publication for certain effects: “Dryden took a holiday from print to write MacFlecknoe, which, withheld from the press, circu lated alongside Rochester's verse in scribally published miscellanies. ‘Mackflecknoe differs from every other known poem written by Dryden to that date {1678} in being vituperative, scatological and riddlingly allusive Bue in this Dryden was simply accepting the decorum of the alternative medium, Jonathan Swift, as a Scriblerian and coterie poet, also wrote for scribal publication and continued the tradition of anti-Petrarchanism that lampooned the kinds of love poems found in print anthologies. Love notes that “the serihal phase of the circulation of Swift's writing is undocumented” but adds that even in print publication Swift continued the satirical tradition of scribalism.® In “The Lady's Dressing Room, " by means of the conventions of material realism more often found in the novel, Swift creates an extravaganza of the lower senses, drawing along the reader with tantalizingly sensual details, mixing metaphors of smell and taste, and in the end fooling the reader by turing attraction into another example of fascinated disgust. The pocm narrates how Strephon sneaks into Celia’s dressing room after she has spent five hours getting ready to go out. His path, through the cluttered space is guided by smell: ‘And first a dirty Smock appear’ Beneath the Arm-pits well besmear'd But oht it turn’d poor Strephon's Bowels, ‘When he beheld and smelit the Towels, Begumm'd, bematter‘d, and beslim’ With Dirt, and Sweat, and Ear-Wax grim'd,

Ws

Danes

31

The Stockings, why shou'd I expose, Stain’d with the Matks of stinking Toes; Or greasy Coifs and Pinners recking, Which Gelia slept at least a week in? Most of the poem focuses on his discovery of “the chest” or chamber pot:

For Strephon ventur‘d to look in, Resolv'd to go thro’ thick and thin, He lifts the Lid, there needs no more, He smelt it all the Time before ‘As from within Pandora's Box, When rimetheus op’d the locks ‘As Mutton Cutlets, Prime of Meat, ‘Which tho! with Art you silt and beat, ‘As Laws of Cookery require, ‘And toast them at the clearest Fire; If from adown the bopeful Chops ‘The Fat upon a Cinder drops, ‘To stinking Smoak it tarns the Flame PPois’ning the Plesh from whence it came, ‘And up exhales a greasy Stench, For which you curse the careless Wench, ‘So Things, which must not be exprest, When plumpe into the recking Chest, Send up an excremental Smell ‘To taint the Parts from whence they fell “The Petticoats and Gown petfume, ‘Which waft a Stink round every Room Thus finishing his grand Survey, Disgusted Strephon stole away Repeating in his amorous Fits, Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits! But Vengeance, Goxidess never sleeping Soon punish’d Strephon for his peeping, His foul Imagination links Each Danie he sces with all her Stinks; And, if unsavory Odouts fy, Conceivesa Lady standing by."

32

Guarey On

Such poems are “distasteful,” as Hardy's Mrs. Dewey would say, precisely because they are s0 evocative of smell and taste, Donne and Swift make extensive use of the directional aspect of smell; the sensation of smell becomes stronger and stronger as one approaches its origin, and the person following an olfactory sense in this way becomes more and more enveloped by the power of that force until the point where it is impossible to hold it at a distance. Even in those poems that tend to emphasize smell over taste, taste as incorporation, and the idea of reciprocally being i corporated is implied. Taste involves the touch and feel of the object in the mouth and results in the liquification of its object. The melting words of the lover, the manipulation of words in the mouth as an extension of erotic manipulation through hands and limbs —all can be resources for the poet of erotic poems, especially in manuscript form. Comparison, with its implication of a distanced view, is in fact a terminus for the sensual work of the erotic poct in a voyeuristic culture of written texts. Hence, the erotic poet has a strong interest in keeping the lover "beyond compare”, beyond compare is the place where the lover has immediate access to the object of his or her desire, and the reader is stranded just beyond the scene. Works of art representing the lower senses thereby often do so in the interest of the lower genre of satire. Like all grotesque works of art, many of these poems of smell and taste rely on the exaggeration of parts for their effects: we never view the figure of Celia, we only find the detritus she leaves. behind. Donne's lovers are represented metonymically through their smells and articles of clothing—we find our voyeuristic desires blocked; in the place of views, fetishistic images with meanings interior to the world of the poem are presented before us. Even in the serious and Aidactically religious poems of George Herbert, the smells and tastes of this world are like will-o'-the-wisps that we would be fools to chase, especially if we forget we are in fact running toward death. Yet just as representations of experiences of smell and taste are common to the “lower” genres of poetry, so are representations of experiences of pure visuality often called on when poetry seeks to objectify its referents or to free itself of past practices. Tasting and smelling are associated with animal life and with experiences of intense intimacy and sexuality. Correlatively, experiences of distanced viewing are associated with objectification, To teat a person like a thing, to look without reeiprocity, is to seek a form of language that is purely material. There is a long tradition in Western thought about language that seeks such an intransitive model: a view of language as antithetorical and sufficient in and of itself as it ap-

WANE Danses

33

proximates the abstraction and self-sufficient terms of musical and visual patterns, Puttenham discusses pattem poems as “ocular represent: in Book Il, Chapter X1, of his Arte. Here he writes, “Your last proportion is that of figure, so called for that it yelds an ocular representation, your meeters being by good symmetric reduced into certaine Geometricall figures, whereby the maker is restrained to keepe him within his bounds, and sheweth not onely mote art, but serveth also much better for briefenesse and subtiltie of device.” He mentions the lozenge, the spindle, the triangle; the square, the pillaster, the piramis, the rondel, and the egge, explaining that he learned of them by being in Italie conversant with a certaine gentleman, who had long tra vailed the Orientall parts of the world, and seene the Courts of the great Princes of China and Tartare. I being very inquisitive to know of the subtillities of those countreyes, and especially in matter of learning and of their vulgar Poesie, he told me that they are in all the inventions most ‘wittie, and have the use of Poesie or riming, but do not delight so mach, 44s we do in long tedious descriptions, and therefore when they will utter any pretie conceit, they reduce it into metrical feet, and put it in forme ‘of 8 Lozange ot square, or such other figure and s0 engraven in gold, silver, or ivorie, and sometimes with letters of ametist, rubie, emeralde ‘or topas curiousely cemented and peeced together, they sende them in chaines, bracelets, collars and girdles to theit mistresses to weare for a semembrance.*

“These “poem gems" ate as two-dimensional as written inscriptions and as three-dimensional as artifacts. Like all glimmering and glittering things, they appeal to the eye first of all and then to the hand that reaches toward them, As C, A, Patrides notes in his standard edition of The English Po ems of George Herbert, pattern poetry was so popular in the Renaissance that Gabriel Harvey was driven to protest against poems that “represente the form and figure of an egg, an ape, a winge, and sutche ridiculous and madd gergawes and crockchettes.”® Such poems became the rage especially after the last decades of the sixteenth century when Petrarchan conventions wore thin and poets turned against the available rhetorical devices. Puttenham often takes the names for his figures from geometry and heraldry as he claims an “Orientall” source for the forms. There are indeed resemblances between the poems Puttenham presents and the Turk-

M4

Cuanren One

{sh and Persian pattern poem tradition that goes beyond the presentation of word sequences shaped as overall forms into a full art of calligraphy and manuscript ornamentation, Ernst Robert Curtius contends in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages that Persian pattern poems may share with Western medieval and Renaissance examples of the genre a common Hellenistic source. Such "figure poems,” rexvonal-yruer (tech nopaignia), he writes “have come down to us in the corpus of the Greek bucolic poets and in the Greek anthology.”” Puttenham, probably received his own knowledge of “pattern poems” by oral transmission, and Western poems of this type compel us to read lines from left to right just as any conventional poem would. Such English poems are quite different from the mazes, labyrinths, medallions, and endlessly decipherable inscriptions of the ghazals of Persia, Practices of pattern and concrete poetry remove the poetic from its attachment to particular voices and bodies to ereate a poetry that is objectlike or artifactual, Such poems—in the Hellenistic age, in the Renaissance, and revived under Modernism—are the most visual and objectifying of all poetic forms. It is indeed not surprising that the final “glimpse” of the experience of imagery such a poem produces is a geometrical abstraction, a pure Platonic form that overrides the fallen materiality of the words. A poem such as George Herbert's “The Altar” uses an extended conceit comparing the speaker's heart to an altar on which the consequent poems in the section called “The Church” of Herbert's volume The Teniple will be placed as offerings: ‘A broken AvtaR, Lord, thy servant rears; Made of a heart, and cemented with teats: Whose parts are as thy hand did frame, No workman's tool hath touched the same, A uraRT alone Is such 2 stone, As nothing but Thy power doth cut Wherefore cach part Of my hard heare Meets in this frame, To praise thy Name That, if 1 chance to hold my. peace, These stones to praise thee may not cease. Oh let thy Blessed sacnirice be mine, And sanctify this ALTAR to be thine.”

The “pedestal” of “The Altar" is built first from a transposition of Scripture from Luke 19:10—"I tell you that, if these should hold their peac, the stones would immediately ery out”—and second from the transposition of positions between the sacrificed ind the recipient of sacrifice. The speaker asks that “thy sacrifice” i-c., Christ's sacrifice) be mine” so that the altar of his own heart, as yet “uncut” stone like that described in Exodus 20:25 and Deuteronomy 27:5~8, be sanctified. Her 4 sabert’s poem is one of his “sacred parodies”: a poem that substitute s

cred theme within the form of an existing secular poem. In this case he has borrowed the shape of an altar from an anonymous work, “An Altare and Sacrifice to Disdaine, for freeing him from lov which appeared ina 1602 anthology, A Poetical Rhapsody. In Herbert's poetry visual resolu tion helps abstract language from its ordinary contexts of sanctify. ing it and teaching the reader to look beyond the immedi world of sen: sual impressions. Three hundred years later, Stéphane Mallarmé’s analogous fin de sie: cle search for a “poésie pur” and his interest in arabesques, typography, and opacity are another important contribution to the tradition of an antithetorical and vis ial poetics, The tradition continues throughout the ‘twentieth century in the avant-garde interest in a poetics of experiment and materiality.” The aims of the Imagist movement in the early years of the century were to employ the “exact word” with no rhetorical decora. tion; to forgo conventional(i-¢., metrical] form; to write on any subject; to present an image; to produce a “hard and clear” poctry without blurring or indefiniteness; to promote “concentration” as the “essence” of poetry This position, which not only promotes the visual but also refutes the au: ral dimension of poetry, is relentlessly antirhetorical. Its objectlike hard. ness and clearness were not meant to touch or move the reader beyond whatever emotion can arise from visual clarity. T. E. Hulme, the move ment's foremost theorist s Ezra Pound was its most prominent literary practitioner, wrote, “This new verse appeals to the eye rather than to the ¢ar. It has to mould images, a kind of spiritual clay, into definite shapes. The material , .. is image and not sound. It builds up a plastic image which it hands over to the reade wher is the old art endeavored always to in“Sea Violet,’ a 1916 poem in three stanzas by “H.D. fluence him./7" (Hilda Dolittle), is a well-known example of the work of the Imagist school. Here are the two opening stanzas The white violet is scented on its stalk, the s

fragile a agate Ties fronting all the wind among the corn shells ion the sand-bank The greater blue violets flutter on the bil tat who would change for these who would change for these cone root of the white sort?”

“Sea Violet” introduces one positive visual image at a time: the white violet, the sea violet, the torn shells, the sand bank, the greater blue violets, the hill, the violet, the sand hill, the light, frost, star, and fire. An image like “one root of the white sort” is used as an absent image, it resembles the role of the wind, which we cannot see but know from resi tance to it (the sea violet lies fronting it) and from the fluttering of the sreater blue violets. As is often the case with Imagist poetry, verbs of being do most of the work. There is no motion brought about by human intention. Color and location ate the individuating qualities of types of things here. As specific kinds of violets (white and sea and greater blue) hecome the violet, “the sand-bank'’ and “the hill” quite beautifully seem to erode into the conglomerate form: the “sand-hill.” And what can H.D. mean by “fragile as agate”? Agate is a stone, the variegated chalcedony ‘whose colored bands and markings are known to most of us through its use in playing marbles. It is no more fragile than any other kind of quartz, but its coloring might be described as fragile: its milky whiteness or grayhess is marked with delicate striations and streams of other hues, The sea violet is as fragile as the stone in the register of visual appearance only— the comparison cannot work if the flower and stone themselves are juxtaposed. And all those things that follow—light and frost and star and fire— are mutable in ways that negotiate the place between things as firm as agate and things as fleeting as the wind. H.D/s use of visual comparison also depends on an abstract sense of smell (“is scented”| and an abstract sense of touch (the “torn shells,” “uttering blue violets,” and the “grasp” doing the catching in, the last stanza), "Sea Violet” only broadly follows the dictates of the Imagist manifesti, but perhaps what makes it a good poem is what does not make ita reverently Imagist poem. When she peats “who would change for these,” she lets the rhetorical reenter, creating an effect of awakening the reader {rom a dream of images into a world made of words

Ww Dn

Dylan Thomus, too, with his unsurpassed genius for sound, uses dia: mond and wing forms in his “Vision and Prayer" in such a way as to un dermine the visual resolution of the work: the poem is an unusual in stance of the possibility of putting sound into tension with image in a Pattern poem. The sequence of geometrical forms is the first thing we no tice in reading the poem, but once we enter the left-to-right progression of lines with their complex tension between exact rhymes, slant rhymes, and true “eye” thymes at the line endings, and his cacophonous use of internal rhymes, assonance, and consonance, we are thrown into a kind of lurching, dancing imbalance. While such movement unsettles us, we travel horizontally across the lines and vertically down the page. Thomas luses these shapes, which are visual “opposites,” to produce a pulsating tension between the externality of vision and the internality of prayer— ot, because such reversals are truly the aim of the sequence, the inter: nality of vision and the externality of prayer. What is outside in the realm of appearances and sounds is taken within the self, id What is in side as image and thought is projected out into the world in this beseech: ing form. The bes; ing and end of the sequence as a whole ndicate the bringing forward of the form and its gradual dissolution, The “midwife” of the opening “diamond” stanzas breaches internal and external space Yet the final “wing” announcesat its visual center, the place where a body would yoke the “wings” themselves, “I am found,” And then the close of the same piece announces, “Now fam lost." The visual resolution of the poem thereby literally is underminedby the temporal, sequential order of the sounds. In his classic study of the theory of perception, Metamorphosis, Er nest G, Schachtel distinguishes between the lower senses of smell and taste and some forms of touch as “autocentric” and other forms of touch sight, and hearing as “allocentric.” The erotic satires we have been read: ing would be strongly autocentnc, and the Imagist and conerete poems would be strongly allocentric in this sense. However, by these terms Schachtel does not intend an ascetic rejection of the animal senses but rather attempts to distinguish between senses resulting in fee ngs of plea on or in the body (the lower senses) sure and pain and physically localized and senses transmitting knowledge about reality needed to orient the self [the higher senses)’ The possibility that touch can be hoth autocentric and allocentric—it can be passively located in the body and limited to pleasure and pain as well as extending from the body and resulting in the ‘ion of its object —is an indication that there is not an absolute externa division between the function of the senses and that any given sense can ends, Visual experience, for example, can be autocentric be used for various

ial, when it involves the simple pleasure of enjoying a pure color or form, and ivean be allocentric, or objectifying, when it grasps an object in the totality of its otherness. Pattern poems are of the group of phenomena wwe think of as having “outlines"—objects that have definable and recognizable spatial boundaries clarifying what they are from what they are not. When we apprehend another person allocentrically, in such an objectifying or outlining way, we also think of subjectivity as bound or delim: ited, and we ignore the temporal aspect of existence, thinking of other persons as fixed identities and viewing them from a fixed perspective. Autocentric sense perception, Schachtel writes, “nemains through life so much closer to the state of fused perceptions in which there is no clear distinction between subject and object and between sensory quality, pleasure, or unpleasure; they are particularly apt ro reactivate complex, global sensorimotor-affective states, and, conversely, eidetic experiences in the autocentric senses are apt to arise when such a complex is activated by a need, a wish, a longing, or mood," In other words, the autocentrie senses of smell and taste merge the subj t with the object of sense impression and thereby are strongly evocative of feelings and memories of past expeences with such objects: autocentric serises are particularly Proustian in this way. Theya ¢ also, their continuity and partialness, often surprising—although they involve elements of volition, they do not hold the object at a distance, Hence, smell and taste lend themselves readily to an aesthetic of surprise and involuntary evocation. In the poems quoted earlier, wit is often consequent to these autocentric qualities to the extent that wit involves both surprise and aggression, Surprise is the result of an unexpected proximity and aggression is linked to repulsion, On the scent Glosure of the poem, we can open the tid to find a place where 's compacted lie or a Pandora's box that is in reality a brimming chamber pot I.

Tax Lyaic Expos

It is obvious thar we could construct a history of the senses by tracing the functions of “lower” and “higher” sense experiences, That is, we could consider the history of the senses as the history af an economy that ranks the senses and regulates the hody’s relation to the social world. When we read a history of the theme of the five senses such as Vinge's The Five Senses, we become vividly aware of the role of anthropomorphic and allegorical representations of the senses in legislating human conduct. Even today we see evidence of the importance of this paradigm: the fore-

groundi of the senses ngof sight and hearing in electronic technology, tran. sitory forms of asceticism in gastronomy and body building and the idea of being in taining for one’s own sexuality, the hyperadvertising per fume and burgeonin popularity of aromatherapy made possible by the wafting away of their referents, the insertionof spectacle into new social spheres in the surveillance technology of the workplace and the photo opportunitiesof the political domain, the narrative of dissipation and conversion of television talk shows with their simultaneous eestasy and den igration of the senses, When works of art take on the theme of the five senses, an atmosphere of prurience and regulation is often created, regardlessof the attitude of the creator. In Richard Brathwaite’s carly seventeenth-century Essay upor the Five Senses, the influence of Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises of the 1520s, with their instructions for deploying the senses to spiritual ends, is readily evident. Brathwaite writes in “An advertisement to the devout Reader, upon the use of the five Senses” in the second edition of 1620: “Lend here thine eare of Zealous attention, fixe here thine eye of inward contemplation, that following the savour of thy Saviours oyntments, and tasting how Sweet he is in godness, thou may unfa with remorse of conscience, Farewell.” This lineage of the regulation of the senses can also be found in the humanist imperatives of these lines from W. H. Auden’s well-known poem on the senses of 1950, “Precious Five’ Be patient, solemn nose Serve in a world of prose The present moment well Re modest, lively ear Sp w The Of this undisciplined And concert-going age

Be civil, hands, on you Al igh you cannot read is written what you do Look, naked eyes, look straight Atall eyes but your own

Look outward, eyes, and love Those eves you cannot be Praise; tongue, the Earthly Muse By num rand by name In any style you choose, Be happy, precious five, ...

Ignatius’s exercises, here in felicitous form, are nevertheless the source of Stephen Dedalus’s terror of the sermon on hell recorded in A Portrait of the Artist ax a Young Man, and we will encounter them again as the foundation for Gerard Manley Hopkins's “desolate sonnets” of 1885. This concern with regulating the senses, although of paramount importance in constructing a history of the senses, nevertheless tends to increase our alienation from the senses and takes us farther and farther away from an understanding of the broader place of the senses in aesthetic activity. Aesthetic activity viewed in the light of the history of ideological ends is no longer aesthetic; it erases the free activity of pleasure and knowledge that the aesthetic brings to human life, When Marx wrote that “the formingof the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present,” he was not beginning with an assumption of the senses as natural or given processes to be restricted and controlled by cultural and social activity. Rather, he considered the senses to be both shaped and shaping forces, productive of forms, influenced by and influencing historical developments in the species beyond the agency of indiVidual subjects. Writing of vision, he says, “The eye has become a human eye, justas its object has become a social, human object—an object made bby man for man. The senses have therefore become directly in their practice theoreticians.” He goes on to propose, “Not only the five senses” but what he calls the “mental” or “practical” senses (will, lave, ete.) come to be “by virtue of their object, by virtue of humanized nature.” The relation of a person to his or her senses is imagined by Marx as of increasing importance, The ongoing formation, even cultivation, of the senses is for ‘Marx a recovery of that power of the body lost to the alienating effects of private property. “The transcendence of private property,” he writes, “is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and quantities, but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively human.” Humanized nature is contrasted to elemental need: “for the starving man it is not the human

form of food that exists, but only its abstract being as food .., the dealer in minerals sees only the commercial values, but not the beauty and unique nature of the mineral: he has no mineralogical sense.’" Who knows, even more than a hundred years after that sentence was written, what such a pure “mineralogical sense” might be? Marx imagines the history of sense impression as a labor of emancipation that would only be finished in a moment of Hegelian fulfillment, a point of replete con: sciousness, where the senses, free of the contingencyof nature and the political economy, were wholly determined and determining accordance with human ends, Marx’s version of the history of the senses might be seen as compensatory to the ways of looking at the senses we have em phasized thus far—the history of taxonomies, hierarchies, and other mod: ¢ls of the senses. For taxonomies and hierarchies of the senses tend both to overestimate the role of human will and overgenerali the senses, In contrast, the history of the senses can be enriched and made more partic ular by an analysis of sthetic acts and their consequences. If we want to examine the senses as a historical, human formation, the place to begin is not only in the philosophical debates on the status of the senses in relation to reality, or in the history of courtesy books and other documentary records of first-person experience, but also in the history of art as the history of human making in accordance with human ends of ex pression. Poctic metaphor is at the center of form-giving activity in any aesthetic practice; it enables us to mediate and entertain at once our ca pacities for sense impressions and abstraction and to imagine, through both memory and projection, forms beyond the contingent circumstances of our immediate experience. The ous arts of sculpture, painting, mu: sic, drama, dance, and poetry—re less of genre or theme—all call on

the senses used in our meetings with other persons by foregrounding ce tain experiencesof touch, seeing, hearing, or kinesthesia or by presenting them in synesthetic combination. Lyric poetry in

particular as

pression and record of the image of the first-person speaker across and through historical and cultural contexts provides us with a form on the boundary among sense impressions, somatic memory, individuation of agency, and social context. In many ways the genre of lyric has as its task the crossingof thresh: olds among persons, positions, and social groups. Whenever traditions have first-person expression in song or otherwise metrically organiz

language and distinguish such expression from choral forms, prose forms,

and other genres,

lyric takes on this function.

Although clearly there

s might make cultu myriad particular genres and finer distinctionone

are

and historically in studying lyric, it i also possible to argue the case for a transcultural study of lyric and for lyric to be considered specifically as a genre of cultural transformation. Of course, we remember that Herder, Hegel, and others held that, in distinction to the musical, visual, and plastic arts with their respective reliance on hearing, seeing, and touch, poetry works by no sense at all, through an immediacy of the soul or an energy emanating from a shaping spirit. But we can also find in lyric a repository of synaesthesia, an archive ‘of the history of how the form has served as a means for working through the body's ongoing mutuality of relations between nature and exterior objects and the ego’s necessary articulation of itself as both separate from the ‘world and transformed by the world. Kant’s discussion of time in his Cri tique of Pure Reason is of patticular relevance here as we think about the relations between interiority and external objects. For Kant, time isa pure form of sensuous intuition and a necessary representation within which all phenomena appear, including our sense of our inner consciousness. Kant argues that “time is nothing but the form of our own internal intu ition,” our primary means of representing ourselves to ourselves." As first-person expression in measured language, lyric poetry lends significant —that is, shared and memorable—form to the inner consciousness that is time itself, The most obvious fats of lyric practice—lyric as first-person expression and lyric as the most musical of literary forms—are the most by sound, interesting here. In lyric synaesthesia figuration is accomplished and spatial interval makes sound intelligible and subject to measure. In "On Lyric Poetry and Society,” first delivered as a radio address to the German public, Theodor Adorno argues that the bourgeois ideology of lyric—that lyric works are opposed to society, fragile, and removed from historical and political concerns—canceals the gemuine cultural work of lyric, For Adorno, Iyric’s task is to mediate between particularity and totality in the representation of persons, His concern is with the status of lyric in late capitalist society, but it echoes aspectsof Romantic philosophies of lyric that in turn drew on Aristotle's account in the Poetics of poetry’s situation between the particulars of history and the abstractions of philosophy. Samuel Taylor Coleridge writes in the Biographia Literaria, "1 adopt with full faith the principleof Aristotle that poetry as poetry, is es sentially ideal, that it avoids and excludes all accident, that its apparent individualities of rank, character, or occupation, must be representative of a class; and that the persons of poetry must be clothed with generic attributes, with the common attributes of the class: not with such as one sifted individual might possibly possess, but such as from his situation it is most probably before-hand that he would possess.”** William Words-

worth also follows Aristotle in “Preface to Lyrical Ball ing poetry's universality as rnoted in the specificity of emotion and formal effects: In spite of differenceof soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and cust sms, in spite of things silently gone out of mind and thingsvi lently destroyed, the Poet binds together by p- ion and knowledge the vast empire of huma society, as $8 spread the whole earth, and all time. The objects of the Poet's thoughts are everywhere; though the eyes and senses of man are, it is i; his favorite guides, yet he will follow wheresoeyer he ean find an paphere of sens. ton in wh move his wings, Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge —it is as i mortal as the heart of man, In line with these pronouncements and the aesthetics of Schiller, Adorno writes that “the substance of a poem is not merely 1 expression of individual impulses and experiences, Those hecomea matter of art only when they come to participate in something univer | by virtue of the

specificity they acquire in being given aesthetic form." He advocatesa particular kind of formalist method that mc s inductively from an ac count of the features of the work outward to social forms. He rejects the

idea that the poem can be a symptom of a preconceived ideology. Like Marx, he contends that the “I” of the artwork, especially in lyric work, at tempts to restore, throug h animation and figuration, the subject alienated from nature. Lyric poems are always in this se e occasions for the emer gence of subjectivity out of alienation Even lyric works in which no trace of conventional and conerete exis: h the “I” creates the sll sion of nature emerging from alienation. Their pute subjects y, the of tthem that appears seamless and harmonious, aspec its opposite, to suffering in an existence alien to the subject apd to love for it as well—indeed, their harmoniousness is actually nothing but the fering and this love

Adorno’s argument concludes that the temporal enunciation of the subject counters both a reification of the subject and any finite det ination of

subjective lack, We might remember that in Vico's argument about the origins of meta

phor in the experience of terror and fear of nature, metaphor bridges the

44.

Cunrren One

relations between individual human experiences: metaphor's aim is not— like that of sacrifice, for example—to establish a determined relation between human beings and gods. In this sense, Vico's ideas about intersubjectivity and metaphor intersect in interesting ways with the work of the pioneering semiotician Charles Morris. Writing on “the interpersonality ‘of the language sign,” Morris notes that “only if an organism can react to its own activity (or its products} with an interpretation similar to that made to this activity (or its products} by another organism ean a sign producible by one organism have to that organism a signification in common ‘with tha of other interpreting organisms.’ Organisms must, in this sense, be able to “stand in each other's shoes” in order to represent experiences to themselves, Morris especially emphasizes the importance of response: “most responses of an organism do not affect the receptors of an organism making the response as they do the receptors of other organisms—the organism, for instance, does not see its factal movements as do other organisms,’" Just as language is necessary to our sense that objects are enduring, so is the reception of facial movement necessary for our sense of our own reality. This is the basis of recognition, the emergence of the person that begins in the intersubjective interpretation of metaphor and contintues in the eultural work of all poetic forms. The punctuation of the temporal flow of inner consciousness, the organization of memory, the determination of feeling, the articulation of point of view in space and time: these qualities of lyric are not the eruption of the body in an alrcady-determined framework of perception. Rather, these qualities characterize our transition toward subjectivity, just as reflection on them transforms the terms of subjectivity and conseso that neither can provide the quently transforms the terms of objectivity “context” for the other. Adorno writes The paradox specific to the lyric work, a subjectivity that turns into ob fectivity is tied to the priority of linguistic form im the lyric, is chat pri arity from which the primacy of anguage in literature in general (even in prose forms] is derived... Hence the highest lyric works are those in which the subject, with no remaining trace of mete matter, sounds forth 1m Janguage until language itself acquires a voice, . This is why the lyric reveals itself to be most deeply grounded in society when tt does not chime in with society, when tt communicates nothing, when, instead, the subject whose expression is successful reaches an accord with language ‘self, with the inherent tendency of language.” Adorno’s argument here is that subjectivity articulates itself as a singular voice when it is most objective, when it takes itself to the limit of what

linguistic experience might be able to produce and at that limit is ex pres ed in its fullest particularity. This transition from an inarticulate subjectivity toward an articulate one via objeetive form is familiar to us by now from Vico’s discussion of the “extremely disturbed passions" at the root of the production of meta phor and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's theory of the ¢ ins of language in emo. tion." A similar approach can be found in Coleridge's po: pn on metric as an act of will, In a passage in the Biographia Literarta, Coleridge ex plains that meter arises as an act of mastery or pleasure in the face of an onslaught of passion (ie., pain}: “This [meter] | would trace to the balance in the mind effected by that spontaneous fort which strives to hold in check the workings of passion, It might be easily explaine likewise in what manner this salutary antagonism is assisted by the very state which it counteracts; and how this balance of antagonists became organi, id into meter... by a supervening act of the will and judgement, consciously and {or the foreseen purpose of pleasure ... there must be] a interpenetration of passion and of will." Indeed, there is a long tradition linking pain and mastery. This idea stems from Anaxagoras's argument that perception involves pain or, al: ternatively, Plotinus’s gloss on Anaxagoras, that suffer: 4s likened to un. knowing and knowledge is likened to mastering. Anaxagoras’s argument is helpful as a theory of metaphor, for he contended that the effect of “un like upon unlike” was particularly difficult to be whe it was excessive in duration or intensity. Confronted with the cog tive dissonance of un intelligible relations, we find relief in comparisonsof likeness and simili

tude.” Vico and Friedrich Nietzsche, too, argue that pain necessitates the invention of metaphor. Such arguments rest on the assumption that lack motivates the desire for the production of form and that a trajectory from pain to ple: ure is created through such production. Such ontological arg ants should not be confused with themes of pleasure or pain in works ¢ art. That producing a thematic of pain might n and consequent form of pleasure is discussed early on in be acu efor Aristotle's Poetics with its comments on the pleasure we might take in viewing an exact representation of a corpse. Another key text would be

’s Ballads” for its complex presentation of “Preface to Lyrical Wordsworth the interrelations of pain and pleasure in poetic composition."" Words:

worth writes:

‘The end of Poetry is to produce excitement in co-existence with an over: balance of pleasure; but, by the supposition, excitement is an una val and irregular state of the mind; ideas and feelings do not, in that state

e

anrre One

succeed each other in accustomed order. If the words, however, by which thisexcitement is produced be in themselves powerful, or the images and feelings have an undue proportion of pain connected with them, there is some danger that the excitement may be carried beyond its proper bounds. Now the co-presence of something regular, something to which the mind has been accustomed in various moods and in less excited the pas state, cannot but have great efficacy in tempering and restraining sion by an intertextute of ordinary feeling... [ sé can be little doubt thut that more pathetic situations and sentiments, that is, those which hhave a greater proportion of pain connected with them, may be endured in ‘metrical composition, especially in rhyme, than in prose

In theories of lyric from Vico forward, the enunciation of pain at the origin of lyric must appear before the emergence of a self-conscious sense ‘of one’s own subjectivity—what Damasio called the “autobiographical

self. To equate pain with subjectivity is to equate the body with subjecnd so to confuse the most collective with the most individual. Pain has no memory; expression depends on the intersubjective invention of asso lation and metaphor. The situation of the person resides in the gen-

esis of the memory of action and experience in intersubjective terms— that is, in the articulation and mastery of the originating pain. Coleridge explains that in the "frequency of forms and figures of speech,” we find “olfsprings of passion” who are as well “adopted children of power.” Yet the mastery of pain through measures and figures is not merely repressive; it is-as well a matter of coming to knowledge and expression. Coleridge's explanation shows a subject coming into activity out of a passive relation to Sent experience, memory and expectation. Here the figures and forms created are those of a subjectivity enunciating itself Divergence in lyric is thus not between language and music but between a subject transiorming him- or herself from the somatie both toward and against the social. The history of lyric is thereby the history of a relation between pronouns, the genesis of ego-tu and ego-vos in the reciprocity of an imagination posing and composing itself and its audience via the work of time. Lyric conventions of addresser and addressee are the working through on the level of literary genre of the function of linguistic shifters. As Roman Jakobson, following the pioneering work of Emile Benyeniste, explains in his classic essay on “Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the Russian Verh,” shifters are both symbols. associated with represented ‘objects by conventional rules, and indices, terms tn existential relation to those objects they represent, Shifters are “indexical symbols.” The pronoun {, explains Jakobson, means the person uttering J, “Thus, on one

hand, the sign J cannot represent its object without heing associated with the latter by a conventional rule [the conyentio pect is that f always means the addresser and yo the addressee of the message to which it be

Jongs} and in different codes the same meaning is assigned to different sequences such as J 0, ich, ja, ete.: consequently Fis a symbol. On the other hand, the sign J cannot represent its object without being in exis. tential relation with this object: the word I designating the utterer is ex istentiallyrelated to his utterance, and hence f ictions as an index.” First-person expression in lyric is related existent ally to the context cof the px m as a whole; it is the poem that makes first-person expression emerge in its individuality as it engages the reader in the eidetic task of the appearofathence “you.” The doubled “I” (authorial intention, the ex pression of first-person voice in the text] encounters a doubled “you" (the

reader's intention toward reception, the implied addressee in the text) The contemporary philosopher G ei0 Agamben emphasizes that “betore designating real objects, pronouns and other indices of enunciation indi

cate precisely that languageis taking place: in this sense, they refer to the very event of language belore referring to a world of signifieds.”°* We are reminded of Adorno’s point that in the most sublime lyric works, the first person expression evolves into the voice of language itself. Lyric brings forward, as the necessary precondition of its creation of a world of “V's” and “you's in mutual recognition, this place of language as the founda. tion of intersubjectivity and intersubjectivity as the foundation for the recognition of persons, A poem such as the closing work of Eliot's Collected Poems, “A Dedication to My Wife," summarize these aspectsof poetic intersubjectivity with an uneasy sense of lyric as a intimacy overheard: “But this destica These fe private words addressed to you in tion is for oth The poem contends that sensual pleasure is replete itself and public,”* has no need far articulation; speech between lovers needs only proximity—the call for meaning arises as a consequence of distance, Ehot ad the public from the start—indeed, from the instantiating moment dresses

a poem. But he also adresses the public with his use ‘ot his desire to write

of the possessive “ours and ours only,” placing all others beyond the space he thereby dedicates to his wife. The pocm begins in pleasure, but some: how, for some tnarticulated reason, pleasure does not suffice and the poet f cls compelled toward meaning, that mean g that only comes into being dn its encounter with the third position—the listener who introduces the social realm of intersubjectivity Bruno Snell makes a sweeping historical argument for his role of lyric in culture in his book on The Discovery of Mind in Greek thought, His

AN.

Chariee Ome

influential theory regarding the rise of the concept of the individual in arly Greck lyric is based on his studies of the “personal lyrics" of Sappho, Archilochus, and Anacreon. For the Greeks, the lyric is # sung poem and “ehey did not list ‘personal’ poetry as a separate genre.” Such personal Iyrics could be sung to a lyre or, in another form, sung toa flute. Snell ar sgucs that in talking of themselves in such lyrics, poets came to be conscious of what was particular or distinctive about their persons. Sentiments stich as Archilochus's “each man has his heart cheered in his own way" may universalize the emotion of being cheered, yet they also single out the experience of individual persons. In Anacreon's and Archilochus’s poems, individualism is tied to individual choice and values often at odds with the values of society as'a whole. A separation between internal and external values thus arises. Sappho may have been familiar with the po: ems of Archilochus, and Snell argues that what comes to fruition in her work is this distinction between “what others prize and what one's own judgment declares to be essential.” The particular innovation she creates is “a new distinction between Being and appearance . .. since it is understood that love is not a private whim, not a subjective affectation, but an experience of the supra-personal of divine dimensions. The lover cannot but find his way to some reality through the agency of his individual passion. Snell's is a dramatic and controversial statement, contending nothing Jess than that the practice of the art form evokes a change in consciousness. Yet he builds his case very carefully, and his critics have often missed the subtlety of his discussion, For Snell has singled out the formal features of lyric—the musical accompaniment that makes the ereation of form out of rhythm an analogue for emotional compulsion; the first-person expression evolving under a restriction of intelligibility toward others; the mutual articulation of, and tension between, “interior consciousness” and “external decorum”—and argues that the process of artistic choice, orientation, cloyure, and reception created such changes in consciousness incrementally. Choice is the means of poetic making and the very substance of the dawning self. Snell reminds us especially that such a “self” only emerges in a context af reception, a context both anticipated and realized: “Emotion never relaxes into uncertainty, but always maintains a steady course towards a concrete goal dictated by desire or ambition, This also ‘explains why the archaic poets, as has long been recognized, never express themselves. . . . They always address themselves to a partner, either a deity —especially in prayer—or an individual or an entire group of men. Though the individual who detaches himself from his environment sev. ers many old bonds, his discovery of the dimension of the soul once more

joins him in company with those who have fought their way to the same insight. The isolation of the individual is, by the same token, the forging, of new bonds."” What Snell does not discuss is that historically such classical lyries have become for us emblems of a fragmented, yet perfected, subjectivity just as the Apollo Belvedere or the Venus de Milo represent bodily ideals through their very partiality. W. R. Johnson writes in The Idea of Lyric “No experience in reading, perhaps, is more depressing and more frustrat ing than to open a volume to Sappho’s fragments and to recognize, yet again—for one always hopes that somehow this time will be different — that this poetry is all but lost to us. .. . Even though we know that Greek lyric is mere fragments, indeed, because we know that Greek lyricis mere fragments, we act, speak, and write as if the unthinka le had wot hap. Pp id, as if pious bishops, careless monks, and hungry mice had not con: signed Sappho and her lyric colleagues to irremediable oblivion." Here is Sappho's phaineta: of, "peer of the gods,” in a recent 1 instation by Jim Powell: In my eyes he matches the gods, that man whe sits there facing you—any man wh Listening from closeby to the sweetness of your voice as you talk, the sweetness of your laughter: yes, chat—L swear i ‘sets the heart to shaking inside my breast, since ‘once I look at you for a moment, | can’t speak any longer bbut my tongue breaks down, and then all at once subtle fire races inst eyes can't see a thing and a whirring whistle thrumsat my hearing,

cold sweat cavers me and a trembling takes ahold of me all over: I'm greenerthan the grass is and appear to myself be little short of dying But all must be endured, since even a poor In this fragment the speaker describes her reaction to her own mer voyeuristic position as one of hushed voice, broken tongue, fire heneath

pains, sweat and blanched limbs. Powell includes the the flesh, tremors, final fragmented line, usually omitted by translators: "But all must be enured, since even a poor |." At least since Longinus, who preserved in his treatise on the sublime the only existing early record of the lyric, it has been this fragment, without the final line, that has come to exemplify the “Do you not marvel," Longinus writes, sublime unity of classi “how she secks to make her mind, body, ears, tongue, eyes, and complexion, as if they were scattered elements strange to her, join together in the same moment of experience? In contradictory phrases she describes her self as hot and cold at once, rational and irrational, at the same time terrified and almost dead.” Longinus praises “her selection of the most vital details and her working them into one whole which produce the outstanding quality of the poem," In Longinus’s account, it is the third: person viewpoint—-what we might sec as both the “natural” viewpoint of the poem and its viewpoint on the level of reptesentation—that unifies the poem, But Powell, following Snell's work on the relation between Iyric and first-person consciousness, points to what is perhaps a more profound aspect of this poem and of Sappho's lyrics more generally: Sappho has visualized her sensations from “the vantage afforded by the spectacle

of their repetition.” In Sappho's lyric the nsations presented might be more accurately

described as experiences of pain. By staging the scene of her sensation of suffering, Sappho acquires an intersubjective position from which to ‘speak. If Eliot's “Dedication” acknowledges the necessity of the third petson as the exchided listener, Sappho’s lyric compels an identification be tween the listener and the speaker as excluded listener. Although the space described is open to view, the poem might be considered as an instance of the genre mapaxdevaidupor (paraclausithyron), the “excluded lover's complaint,” or complaint at the door, for it describes the progress of the lover from one blockage to another, the senses constantly turned back from the object of the speaker's desire. The path of sensation in the poem moves from the obi tivity of sight to the interior, tactile sensation of trembling. At the outset sight blocks hearing —in torment, the speaker can hear sound but not actual words and phrases. And this sensation of a kind of broken synesthesia, in which sight is accompanied by an intricate blockage in hearing, results in the shaking, first of the heart and eventu: ally of the whole body, that breaks down the speech by which the poem itself is being constructed, As seeing entirely gives way and hearing even of sounds gives way, the speaker's trembling takes her to the "green'" state of near-death. She moves, as do all lyric speakers, from being spoken to speaking. from pain to articulation, from private sensation to intersubjec-

tivity, "Peer of the gods” serves as Longinus’s example of sublimity be cause he contends the representation of sublimity in art is the repetition and mastery of physical or cognitive pain, Emotion recollected in tranquility® is emotion under the rule of either the understandingor the rea: son, shaped into form in accordance with human ends. To what extent this paradigm of the repetition of pain under cond tions of mastery might be a transcultural account of lyric origins is yet another question. Let us look at some metrically organized first-person expressions from a quite different linguistic tradition: the Tlingit people of Alaska. In his 1908 report to the Bureau of American Ethnology, “Tlin git Myths and Texts,” John R, Swanton records a variety of examples of Tlingit genres, including myths, speeches for ceremonial occasions, and songs, which he had collected in Sitka and Wrangel, Alaska, in the winter and early spring of 1904. Franz Boas noted ten years later, in his own stud ies of Northwest Coast that like other forms, verbal art was marked by “simplicity of style... where poems consist sometimesof the intro: duction of a single word into a musical line, the music being€ ied by a burden, sometimes of a purely for al enumeration of the powers of supernatural beings.” ! Of the songs he collected, Swanton wrote, “The language of these songs is so highly metaphorical that they are often difficult to undersea id even in the light of the native explanations, and in some cases the author's informants were themselves uncertain with re gard to the meaning, Several songs refer to myths and are explained by them, and ere are a few shamans’ songs, but by far the larger number were composed for feasts or in song contests between men who were at en mity with each other.’ Among the latter is number 68, a song “com posed by Among-the-brant (Qénxo' of the Kiksa’di, about Saxa’, when his wife had been taken from him, and he felt very sad. The last words are said to be in Tsimshian” ig! det’ yarxtuwu', Wadhke’txoya'ite [Around = Twere thismy [Tome isvery ceatrying mind} hard Hayu’ walgi’k einda’ [In Tsimshian: What is the matter with you

ye

this

am

axtuwn!

Swanton translates as follows: "My own mind is very hard to me, It is just as if | were carrying my mind around. What i the matter with you This song is linked to several other texts in the Swanton antho! ogy. First, it bears some reference through the composer's proper name Qénxo’" (the prefix gén meaning “brant’—in English, “Among-the

52

Cnanen One

brane’, to myths Swanton records as numbers 24 and 54, These two myths recount stories of brant brides, who alternate between their bird and human forms and who marry human men. In both these stories, the human husbands leave their own moieties to act to help the brant, and specifically their fathers-in-law, in situations of war and distress, Tlingit marriage is exogamous and matrilineal, so when a man makes an exogamous marriage to a brant woman, his progeny will be members of the brant, just as the future actions of the mythic exogamous husbands demonstrate newly assumed brant filiations, The historical actions lying behind this mourning song reverse the situation of a man making an exogamous marriage, for here the wife is the one who is removed from her family group as she is taken away by force. These myths can be said to bear a relation to the first-person present experience of the song in a fashion analogous to the role allusions to the Iliad play in many of Sappho’s present-centered lyrics. Among-the-brant is allying himself with Saxa’ in a situation of distress as the mythic hus: bands ally themselves with theit brant relatives. The lyric singer seems spoken through by a pain comparable to that of the injured Saxa’ himself he is alienated from his own mind, a condition that ts very “hard” to him and that recapitulates the situation of incommensurable identification with the pain of another. The last line, in Tsimshian, moves away from the deep interiority of this painful state into a situation of overly extended exteriority—“What is the matter with you!” is a question that can be an swered only through a process of intersubjective translation, whether it is addressed from the closest interior identification or the most extended boundary-crossing communication between Tlingit and Tsimshian speakers, Remarkably, the lyric compels any Tlingit listener to move toward a Jess intelligible, or unintelligible, language at closure and any Tsimshian listener to begin in a situation of less intelligibility, or unintelligibility, toward the closure asa revelation, The singer, Among-the-brant, is speaking. out of the pain of empathy and being spoken through by the utterance of Saxa': there is no place in the song where we can tell whether the con: vention at work is direct first-person expression ar dramatic monologue, The problem is already anticipated in Aristotle's Poetics, Section III, where he writes “siven the same medium and the same object, one can imitate partly by narration and partly by dramatic dialogue (as Homer does}; ot one can speak invariably in one's own person; or one can tse actors to imitate the whole thing as though they were living in it themselves," A work is narrativeif the poet him- or herself is the agent of the presentation in the work, whereas it is dramatic if the work involves a presentation by his agent or actor, In Among-the-brant’s song we find the

same ambiguity between the first person and the representation of first person that we might encounter in any textual fragment from any tradi tion. Yet inevitably there is a figuration of one person by means of an other's expression through retrospection, Of even more immediate relevance to Among-the-brant’s songi ond textual analogue: the next song Swanton records, number 65, which is on the same subject of the kidnapping of Saxa"'s wife. In this case the song was composed by Saxa’ himself and Swanton provides further infor mation in a note, explaining that a man named Kiult!e’-Ic, belonging to the Chilkat Ka‘gwantan, ran away with Saxa"s wife. Then Saxa"'s wife was afterward killed by the kidnapper's first wife, whom he had abandoned: Désgwa'tc [Already

—gigésitiin youhaveseen

ke. up

acdayi'n aya’x uwagu't dogodji’. [Tose ourto hascome her Wolf her her (phratry|

yagaddida’ goingtothe spirit world

——_ya'divat this Raven.

Na‘nayis aastti'n dogadi’ Death for she has her Wolf seen (phratryl,)

Swanton's translation of this song is “You have already seen this Raven go. ing up to the ghost country. Her Wolf phratry has come out to see her. She has scen her Wolf phratry for death,” The Ka'gwantan clan is part of the Eagle moiety, and the Chilkat River is predominantly the territory of Raven (Kiksadi) moiety clans, according to a recent essay on Swanton’s work by the foremost contemporary au: thorities on Tlingit, Dick and Nora Dauenhauer.!™ The Dauen! ers have both praised Swanton’s care in his transcription and criticized his ne glect of details of the kinship terms that they contend lie at the heart of thes . songs such as the motivation for Tlingit songs, including mourning Nevertheless, following their work on another Swanton song, number 80, we might note that Sixa" wife, kidnapped bya man whose name reflects a territorial ambiguity between the Eagle and Raven moieties, is mourned by Saxa’ in such a way as to restore her identity to her Wolf moiety, the moiety that would have been the locus for his relationship with her and for their progeny, now cruelly thwarted by her murder, Her dislocation as a Raven is ended by the greeting of the wolves Too much is missing for any reading of such a poem to be confident of explanation, Johnson’s lament about the material disappearance of Sap. pho's lyrics is readily transposed to the problem of Native American songs recorded by textual means and now often our only evidence of languages

34

Cuarren One

that have either disappeared or are threatened with disapp of songs, we can see that lyric expres even through such fragments

fers significantly from myth and discursive speech by its immediacy, its expression of pain through sung means, and its ability to cross the thresh

old between subjects in the interest of the figuration of a human countenance. I would argue that we do not have to know, nor indeed could we know, cultural contexts in all of their particularity before we follow the mavement of available lyric fragments—such a totality of contextualization i spossible, Nor must we root every detail of such works in specific historical and cultural precedents, for it is one of the cultural tasks of lyric to create the specificity a! such contexts—to manifest individual exper ence in such a way that ticular are intelligible. There is not a boiler: plate for understanding Saxa"s emotion; S4xa"s expression of emotion and ‘Among;the-brant’s expression of Saxa’’s emotion are the beginning of a possibility of understanding what is Tlingit and what is universal about the situation of mourning, In the transference of emotion in these lyrics, we find the work of lyric

form to be the constitution of the image or vidos of persons, W? There is a profound connection between the person and the persona or figured mask here.

Pound's 1952

assemblage of his shorter poems under the title Per-

sonae call attention to the relation between representing the self and representing others in two poems that we ean read as a progression. The first dates to his 1908-1910 collection:

(On His Own Face in @ Glass O strange face there in the glass! O nibald company, O saintly host, O sorrow-swept my fool answer! O ye myriad That strive and play and pass, Jest, challenge, counterlic! a And yet

The second is from the "Lustra’ collection of 1912: Coda

My songs, Why do you look s0 eagerly and so curiously into people's faces, Will you find your lost dead among. them? *

‘Whereas the first poem displays the face of the self in the mirror’s mask, in which myriad are the face’s expressions and myriad are the responses of others until the multiplication of “I's” is only resolved in the second. person plural view of "ye," the second poem shows the self turning away from its own image in the desire to recover what is truly its own and what it truly has lost—its own dead, its own beloved faces in the faces of others, Rather than think of the mask as a device of concealment under which the true identity, the irreducibility of material flesh, will le, we might think of the mask as the representation of intelligible expressions of emo: tion. Human beings are unique in the complexity of form and range of semantic interpretations of their facial expressions — expressions that we have seen, in our mention of Charles Morris's work in semioties, are dependent on the recognition of others, for we cannot see our own faces. Recent work on imal calls as antecedent to the evolution of human linguistic behavior has linked se al features of such calls to human fa cial expressions. Most significant, the: features indicate that many mal calls are volitional and not merely, as eighteenth- and nineteenth: century writers had often contended, unbidden responses to pain, alarm, for other forms of stimulation, Correlatively, many animal calls are context-dependent, often involving an “audience effect,” whereby the presence of a “listener” or recipient for the call stimulates calling behav ior. Even more dramatically, such calls can be fictional, as when the food ealls of cocks to hens are given deceptively; the male holds something inedible in his billas he calls from a distance to the female. Such calls can show signs of individual idiosynerasy, and the successful functioning of ‘ social group might depend in fact on the overlapping functions of stich individual markers. Human facial expressions are analogously used in a paralinguistic way to modulate the meaningof spoken words, to indicate emphasis, and to stimulate turn taking in conversation.!! Furthermore human facial displays are most likely to be expressive to another person, rather than expressive of underlying states of emotion. They are far more likely to be expressed when there is a receiver present.!! ‘This research suggestively recalls R, G, Collingwood's important dis tinetion in his Prine les of Art between arousing and expressing emo: tions; Expressing’ emotions is certainly not the same thing as arousing we express it. But as we express it, we there before them. There is emotion confer upon it a different kind of emotional colouring, in one way, there: fore, expression creates what it expresses, for exactly this emotion, col uring and all, only exists so far as it is expressed. Finally, we cannot say

Lad'laxa

Mask Representingthe Deer fa) Mask cloned, ()b ¥ the foreleg of the Weer, caried in the hands of dancer, () mask [rom Noas 189)

what ‘emotion’ is, except that we mean by it the kind of thing which, on the kind of occasion we are talking about, is expressed.’ Simply arousing

emotion is something Collingwood associates with craft and the general feat m or typification of response: it is clear that by “craft” hehas something in mind like mere rhetoric. Art proper was the expression of emo a highly individuated sense. Collingwood feels that art enlarges and clar jes consciousness as it involves more and more complex forms of emotional expression." Masks can be seen as devices for ex: ending further the possible range of emotios 1 expression. As D. W. Lucas explains in his history of the

Greek tragic poets, “It is probably no accident that Dionysus, the god of traged was one of the two Greek gods who ¢ ought to enter into possession of hu nan beings, and that the mask is associated with his worship."""? In his classic essay on the origins of the self, Marcel Mauss dis cusses how the ire dramatic system of a culture can be more than

aesthetic: “it is religious, cosmic, mythological, social and personal.” At stake in such a system is every aspect of the social hierarchy and its articulation of individuals as well as the very existence of “the ancestors who are reincarnated in those who have a claim to them, who return to life in the bodies of those who bear their names—to which perpetuity is guaranteed by the ritual in al its phases.” He particularly cites “an insti tution and object common from the Nootka to the Tlingit of Northern Alaska; this is the use of remarkable masks with double and even triple shutters, which open to -al the two and three beings (superimposed totems) personified by the creator of the mask.”"!* If we look at the text ‘Mauss used as evidence for this point, Franz Boas's 1895 compilation of the fleld notes of George Hunt (the son of a Scottish father and a Native American mother who was trained as an ethnographer by Boas), we find that it is often the case that the last shutter opens to reveal # human face In figure 192 of this text, reproduced here on p. 56, a deer mask opens toa human face; in figure 195, a killer whale mask opens to a human face; and in gure 194, a collection of masks is displayed which represents a range of human speakers." I would suggest that it is exactly this sort of shuttering effect that is created when Among-the-brant expresses in Tlingit Saxa’s emotion and then asks his question of the audience in Tsimshian. Sappho, in the spec tacle of the repetition of her experience of shattering, similarly gives aes thetic boundaries—the Sapphic that is her very namesake—to an experi ence that cannot be totalized or visualized because it takes place deep within her own body and consciousness. In Sappho’s lyric the speak ing subject triumphs over the subject of mere being. Lyric poems and masks arrest the flux of facial expression. As forms of art with closure and repeatability, they enable a complex and overdetermined response in the realm of face-to-face experience—experience to hand and within the sphere of individual gesture and individual reception

SOUND

L

Dynamics oF Posric Sounp

ing machine — of the mockingbird, Does the mockingbir only a compulsion to sound in his own song but also, in hen his song: “am the mockingbird, the one who sounds like a cardinal, an ways what in And ike a wren, like an oriole, as Iplease”? dets of improvisation and special effects; he also ca Properly, they are forms iole do not respond to what he sings. Herder once said of p starlings, they “have learnedenough human sounds thought a human w The mockingbird is not thinking a cardinal word, a wren word, an oriole word. Human songs can be and space, and they will be met with response and acted on. When they re reported and repeated in this way, they acquire both fixe

60.

CuareenTw

capacity to change. We humans speak in conditions of reciprocity, but also, like mockingbirds, we speak in conditions of imitation—and when We practice the arts of fiction, we are imitating, and responding to, our own conditions of reciprocity. Yet when the human voice is singing, no birds sing. Mauss suggests that it was only retrospectively that etymologists eonstructed the source of the Latin term persona in per-sonare, the mask through which the voice of the actor or agent will sound? Nevertheless, throughout his history of the development of the concept of a person—the relation of masks to the rights of name and family in ancient Rome; the attachment of the cognomen to the imago or wax death ma isk of the face) the dual sense of the person as a role and inner, intimate conscience that arose under Stoic philosophy; the Christian concept of the soul and the modern concept of the psychological self—a paradigm of inner feeling and ‘outward expression develops wherein the individuality of the inner self is the ground of all rights and receptivity regarding expression. As Mauss himself summarizes such a history, “From a mere masquerade to the mask, from a role to.a person, to a name, to an individual, from the last to a being with metaphysical and ethical values, from the latter to a funda mental form of thought and action—that is the route we have covered.’"* This is thereby the history of the modern notion of the person, on who is the subject of experience and maker of choices, one whose existence is in and for itself ‘Thus far we have spoken in general terms about the origins of subjectivity in the drive toward figuration or representation of persons and of the ongoing work of poiésis as the articulation and preservation of such images as we encounter them in face-to-face situations. Yet poetry is a form tof verbal representation, and, even in its written form, it evokes aspects of aurality in production and reception. In this chapter and the next [ will focus on this aural dimension of poetry, placing it within a phenomenology of hearing and voicing. To speak of the aural aspect of poetry is to begin to speak necessarily of its linguistic dimension, but we will also need to consider the prelinguistic and extralinguistic dimensions of sound embedded in the language of poetry. Here the semantic and discursive aspects of poetry emerge from, but do not entirely displace, such nonsemantic features, Earlier we saw in the discourses on the hierarchies of the senses that eating and speech were necessarily regulated, that the mouth as a site of introjection and extrajection came under a certain economy, The separation of animal and human functions is key to that economy and one that marks the division between the expression of nonmeaningful and meaningful sounds. Ovid, for example, turns many of his transformations upon

this boundary. Io is changed into a heifer by Jupiter, and when she tries to complain, she is “terrified by her own voice,” a lowing sound from her lips. Phaethon's sisters are turned into trees, able to m« only their lips they call to the mother until d he bark closes over their last words. Juno tums Callisto a bear and “deprives her of the power of speech." Ocy thoe, the daughter f the centaur Chiron and the nymph Chariclo, loses her sense of prophecy and more when she is changed into a horse: first she speaks, then she sounds like a person trying to imitate a horse, and then she "gives vent to shrill whinnyings.” Ovid reminds us hat animals are not “dumb” and in fact have their own methods of communication, in-

cluding communication with humans, but animals do not speak, they do not produce individual expressionsof meaning designed to be intelligible and at the same time uniquely expressive of their awn being. The mortals

become “a” heifer, “a” bear, “a” horse. Pethaps worst of all, the terrible grief of Hecuba is expressed by her barking likea dog. For these characters, o the loss of their human losing a capacity for speech is yoked not form but also to the loss of the form of their personsor proper names

that name by which they are cal ed or summoned into the reciprocity of living hum: n speech. hoses is more indicative of the relations Yet no story in the Meta between animal sounds, human cries, human calls, and na ning than that of the destruction of Actaeon, whom Diana turned into a stag as a pun: ishment for entering her sacred grove and seeing her bathing. As he de scribes Actaeon’s transformation, Ovid lists, over many lines, all the par ticular names by which he calls his hounds, Actacon utters “a groan... a sound which, though not human, was yet such as no stag could produce. When the stag Actacon falls into a posture of prayer, his friends urge on

the dogs and at the same time call out for “Actacon,” who, from their per spective, is now missing. Actacon tui rns his stag’s head at the sound of his name [he is now an animal who recognizes his “call"), but no one recip. rocally can recognize him, and his own dogs tear him to pieces. It is hard to imagine a more carefully plotted and graphic description of the total breakdown of communicability between persons, between persons and animals, and between animals and other ani Inv a paradigmatic essay on “Conditionofs Personhood,” Daniel Den: nett lists six necessary conditions for personhood that are the very qual legends, These are (1) that persons are rat tes broken down in es sness of consciou beings ) that persons are be to which stat tributed, or to whichp chological or mental or intent al predicates is the recipient of a certain attitude or stance are ascribed, (3) that a person adopted with respect to him- or herself in regard to such personhood,

(4) that persons are capable of reeiprocating in relation to this stance taken toward them; (5) that persons are capable of verbal communication; and (6) that persons are distinguishable from other entities by being conscious in some special way.’ If we read back Dennett's conditions into Ovid's characters’ losses, we see that the loss of a facility for verbal communication involves the loss of those attitudes or stances that will be adopted with respect to figures who sj cak their consciousness and rationality— and hence the loss of both the attribution of intention and the attribution of consciousness. It is verbal communication that exists on the periphery and reception. The bark of internal consciousness and external expression closing over the lips of Phaethon’s sisters is like a stone sealing up the cave of their personhood. The “special” consciousness of human agents is dependent on our facility for forming our interior thoughts into syntactical units, units that articulate relations of causality and consequence, giving closure to material in such a way as to produce aggregations of meaning, or repeating to ourselves, and projecting into time and space, modelsof experience. All of their expressions of form, and expressions of mastery of form, go beyond mere utterance—the kind of utterance we would associate with an unbidden response to pain or surprise, We saw in the previous chapter that many animal calls, too, go beyond such unbidden responses: such capacities for volition, for sensitivity to context and the receptivity of given audiences, and for individuation can be said to flower in the evolution of human gesture, facial articulation, and language. Producing and receiving sounds in order to form intelligible meanings involves mastery aver relations of proximity and distance and presence and absence. In this is the profound relation we began to speak of in the first chapter between the cultural work of poetry and the ontology of persons, Young children play with absence and presence in a game Freud. termed “fort (gone}/da /hete].” There are many ways to play this game. A father might put his hands over his face or over a rattle and say, “Where's Daddy?” or "Where is the rattle?” and then, unveiling the face or rattle, exclaim, “Here lam!” or "Here it is!” Soon, a child will do the same with her own face and her own objects. And then the child will he able to play both roles, hiding and finding from her and for her own self, feigning puzzlement during the hiding and both feigning and expressing delight in the finding. Freud explained that the game supplants an absence (the absence, ultimately, of the nurturer) with a thythm, The child masters de sire and produces pleasure under conditions no longer external to his or her agency: “the child may, after all, only have been able to repeat his unpleasant experience in play because the repetition carried along with it a

yield of pleasure of another sort bur none the less a direct one,” This thythm suffuses the production of speech in general, yet it is he in the many forms of repetition we find in poems. In later work on this pic, Jacqui La discusses the importanc of the e presence and absence of sound and figuration as part of what he calls the invocatory drive, the propulsion to ke one’s self heard andseen in general, He describes an outward and return movems as part of al drives: the oral as the urge te incorporate, the anal as the urge to retain, the scopic as the urge to orga nize the visual field.’ Through the i drive, the infant'sneed for nurturance becomes expressed as well mons becomes vocalization for its own sake, the sake of the pleasure of mastery and expression over the pulsion or rhythm between sounding and interval Allen he continuity between such early experiencesof the world an cific features of sound and thyme in poetry The mother is present wherever in the poem language is specialized to ward sound, as in thyme which arrests the word in the ear, requiring that repetition dence and establish difference at the lev l of

substance,

The

difference

conditions of sen: rileof texture), and as the substantiationof the parallel ambiguity at the level of meaning, Sound as silence (thyme jon) articulates silence as sound (the meaning of words and man's posit » in this regard with that of Julia Kristeva on the significance for poetic theory of the idea of a chora—a retrospec stic form (Le tively posited prelinguistic condition out of which one’s socialization into linguistic form} emerges’

Thechord is not posit (Le.ion not yet to attainto this precedes and underlies ous only to vocal of

2

oF

somenne

a signifier either}, iis, however, generated in orde signifying position, Neitherm py, the chon figuration and thus specularization, and is anal kinetic rhythm. We must restore this motility

4

Coarree Tw

gestueal and vocal play (to mention only the aspect relevant to language) ‘on the level of the socialized body in order to remove motility from ontol: ‘ogy and amorphousness where Plato confines it in an apparent attempt to ‘conceal it from Demoeritean thythm. The theory of the subject proposed. by the theory of the unconscious will allow us to read in this zhythimic space, which has no thesis and no position, the process by which signifi. cance is constituted. Plato himself leads us to such a process when he calls this receptacle or chora nourishing and maternal.”

Grossman's thinking follows Kristeva’s only to a certain point. Whereas for Kristeva there is a “theoretical imperative” to the positing of “semiotic” |i.c,, nonsymbolic, or prelinguistic} sphere of the chora—a re lation prior to language, between motility and amorphousness that would necessarily be a precondition to the intelligibility and naming of forms ~for Grossman the maternal rhythm is never superseded by language; rather, it remains within language as the surprise of difference /nondifference and the recut ig substantial bodily sensitivity to sound, Sound making is always in tension with sense making, yet is also the precondition for sense making, Grossman thus also separates the “measure” or “counting” of articulated rhythms in poetry from the sensual immersion of sound. ‘At the level of prosodic order the vehicle of care in the poem is meter, which masters the tendency of speech to disappear. .. syllable count, and linear order in general, represent the care which keeps world in being,’"!? Measurement in prosody is literally a counter to the sensual amorphousness of sound articulation If meter is the evidence of intended care and so evidence of human countenance, then what are we to make of the sense of human intervention that arises when the line is either halted or spilled, as we find in caesura and enjambment, respectively? This “pausing” and “running on" is, like catachresisin metaphor, even deeper evidence of the individuation ‘of sound production in the poem, We could argue that it was not always so, a8 many nursery rhymes still demonstrate, In Old English verse the medial caesura was automatically used to separate each line into two isochronous hemistichs and to emphasize the regularity of the structure. Counting-out rhymes, for example, often depend on such pounding hemistichs to effect their final, determining emphasis—the word that “counts out” the player: One-erzoll, tworer ol , / 2ick-erzoll zan, Bobtail vinegar, ttle tall tan;

Harum, squarum, // Virgin Maram Zinctum, zanctum, buck!

By 1599, the date of George Pecle’s lovely "Bethsabe’s Song” from his dram “David and Fair Bethsabe,” the transformation of expectations be tween the predictable hesitations of medial caesuras and the mimetic spo taneity and emotional force of enjambment can be, indeed, the focus of the poem Hot sun, cool fire, tempered with sweet att Black shade, fatr nurse, shadow my white hair, Shine, sun; burn, fire; breath, ar, and ease me Black shade, fair nurse; shroud me and please me Shadow, my sweet nurse, keep me from burning, Make not my glad cause cause of mourning Let not my beauty’s fie Inf Nor pierce any bright eye That wandereth lightly." The pattem of oxymorons and antinomies (hot sun/cool fire, black/fair, shadow/ white, glad/mourning] brought forward by the medial breaks and relations between paired lines beautifully is brought to a climax by the necessary pause between cause and cause—a pause that is both retro. spectively known as a reversal and proleptically anticipating a complete turn in perspective: the speaker asks in the final “run-on” lines th other ¢ inflamed or piercedb her own beauty’s radiance. By means of

this type of anticipated caesura, regularity of effect slows the pacing of speech and silence in conformity to expected patterns and norms

Yee when irregul ie use y is presented by the sudden or idiosyn of caesura or when enjambment is used, the speaking voice is counter to drive suggestively claims of the invocatory the chy m, Lacan's discussion that, alone among the drives, it “has . . . the privilege of not being able to close.” !} Rather than thematize this as a tension between uniformity and singularity, however, we can se: at such caesuras ring pulse and breath to the poem itself—they are animating features that add to the pas ges amid his embo nent of voice in the poem. In two intriguing classical drama, the Romantic German po ontions theoretical specula Friedrich Holderlin in fact considers caesura as a far-reachin dividuation. He writes that “in the rhythmic sequence of th

tions wherein transport presents itself, there becomes necessary what in poetic meter is called cesura, the pure word, the counter-thythmic rupture; namely, in order to meet the onrushing change of representations at its highest point in such a manner that very soon there does not appear the cha ize of representation but the representation itself.” The caesura “calls up" and breaks through the transport of rhythmic propulsion. Although we can read these remarks as a useful account of the work of caesura in the individual line, Hélderlin’s thoughts on such breaks extend to the structure of the nntire drama, He writes that in the Oedipus cycle “the speeches of Tiresias form the caesura, He enters the course of fate as the custodian of the natural power which, in a tragic manner, removes man from his own life-sphere, the center of his inner life into another world and into the excentric sphere of the dead.” And in his discussion of Andromache he draws an analogy between the “calculable law” of rhythm and the play’s concern with the rents and breaks in that coherence. not simply an alter: Holderlin shows that the unanticipated caesu

nation of a rhythmic pattern, but is as well a gesture of breaking or hesi tating that opens the text to the excentric positions of unintelligibility and death. Milton’s lines on his blindness in Book 1 (Il. 40-88) of Paradise Lost present an array of uses of the caesura as they mark his severing from the world of nature and other men. The passage is a moving and extreme example of the kind of Iyric of individual preference and circum: stance Snell described in his account of the origins of Greek lyric: ‘Thus with the Year Seasons return, but not to me returns: Day, or the Sweet approachof even or morn, ‘Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine; But cloud instead, and ever-during dark Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men Cut off, and for the hook of knowledge fair Presented with a universal blank

We cannot anticipate where the eaesura will fall in these pentameter lines and so are ourselves going forward in blindness without knowledge of how the pattern will proc id, Those lines with initial caesuras—' Day,” “Surrounds i ad ut off"—create an incremental progression of meaning, as if they were themselves a kind of sentence. Those with medial

caesuras inevitably p 1 “vernal bloom” with “cloud instead” and “sum: ing dark.” The return to “blank verse" in the final line 1 have transcribed here presents its own dark pun: “a universal blank

The invocatory act creates a dynamic between the emergent and the unlimited in the pate f rhythm’s repetitions, Rhythm involves voli

tio toward mastery, yet it also involves, in the ways it come to inhabit s us, a compromise between volition’s expression and the demand for repe tition of the form. Poe ¥y imitates the invocatory drive, but not simply in terms of the articulation of the speaker, Rather, as imitation, poetry presents an image of the speaker in relation to alistener and begins the social work of making that relation intelligible through its own projected conditions of reception, Poems are not a matter of producing discursive sentences, although they often involve the im: the production of discursiv sentences, At the core of invocatory activity is repetition evolving into thythm. Hegel's Philosophy of Fine Art explicitly connects rhythm to our capacity for self-identity in this regard. Relying on

tion of single-point perspective, Hegel says that in space everything ex

position and can be taken in at aglance. Yet, following Kant’s thoughts on time as the continuity of internal intition, he says, in time ‘one moment vanishes into another in an unending flow, When we use musical time or beats to give ape, to inform, this flow, we often find our own selves caught up in "keeping time"—even unconsciously. Hegel makesa point of saying that n should be differentiated in this re gard fro} gones as m sical sounds per se and time measurements re garded abstractly, for neither tones nor a general sense of time are involved. -eping of uniform divisions and repetitions. He concludes:

Musical time is consequently something wholly created by the hunua tion, thatwe have, in this control of time acceding to fixed ule, nothing less than a real reflection of our spiritual nature, ot rather that of the fun damental cruth of self-identity, an illustration absolutely precise of th way in which the subject of consciousness applies this very principt

And it is for this reason that th

musical

timemeets with

such

of our inmost life. And the same remarks apply to the measure and thyme of poetry. The sensuous medium is here, to, in the sar way car ried out of the sphere of that which is external to ourselves,

Poems compel attention to aspects of rhythm, thyme, consonance, assonance, onomatopoeia, and other forms and patterns of sound to which attention is not necessarily given in the ongoing flow of prose and conversation.!” This attention to sound is defined against, and helps establish, the various intelligible units or parts of poems, all of which are put into mutual relation or tension: individual words, the pauses and breaks between words, lines, and sentences line beginnings and endings, features internal to individual lines, such as internal rhyming, the structure of stanzas and relations between stanzas, between stanzas and choruses, burdens anid refrains, and, finally, of course, closure as the overall temporal dimension, or drive toward ending, of the poem and closure as the overall spatial dimension or “taking place” of the poem—the latter the drive toward integrity and singularity in the work as a whole."* In classical practice, and classical criticism, the bond between music and lyric is paramount—nonnarrative and nondramatie poe ie genres ‘were intended to be sung, chanted, or recited to musical accompaniment.” Lyré, a musical instrument, mele, air or melody. These are commonplaces of the history of lyric poetry, and when we read a poem, regardless of the Language in which it is composed, we speak of such features 4s counterpoint, harmony, syncopation, stress, duration, and timbre as if the ways in which sound is measured in music and lyric were analogous. But lyric is not music—it bears a history of a relation to music—and, as 4 practice of writing, it has no sound; that is, unless we aré listening to 4 spontaneous composition of lyric, we are always recalling sound with only some regard to an originating auditory experience» The sound recalled in poetry is not abstract, not a succession of tones without prior referents; rather, the sound recalled is the sound of human, speech. What is the nature of this recalling? It is not like readinga score 6 script with an orientation toward performance, for we are absorbed in the temporality of the poem's form and have no need to prepare ourse for, or orient ourselves toward, a replication of the poem—in fact, to produce such a replica would not necessarily require reading the poem at all It is not like viewing a representation of an utterance, as in looking at a painting of sound—Edvard Munch’s screaming figure or the “mouth: ing” of The Oath of the Horatit—tor the poem itself is an utterance, an expression of a person that we apprehend in turn as the expression of a per-

son. And it is not like an to reconstitute a context tending to both what the semantic orientation in auditory conditi

exercise in historical linguistics in which we try of original utterance, for we are interested in al poem says and how the poem say ofa reception. Because we cannot reconstitute thes duction, our recalling will always

ther auditory prompting nor the he capacity to compose or remember a visual field or sequence of mus cal phrases without external stimuli, so can we “hear” a poem when a text is pres nt by calling itto mind. In turn, we wil bring to a text our mem

speaker'sspeech experience, but su provide the vehicle for, the apprehension of the poem as a whole A whole range of sensual associations can come to mind with particu lar sounds and sound clusters. Consider the powerful synesthesia that is often at work between sound and color in poems. The classic instance of such a poem is Arthur Rimbaud’s “Voyelles” of 1871 A noir, E lane, I rouge, U vert, O blew: voyeltes, Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes: Qui bombinent autour des puanteurs exvelles, Golfes d'ombre; E, candeur " Lancesdes glaciers fiers, rois blancs 1, pourpres, sang crache, rite d Dans la cotere ou les ivresses pénitentes: U,cycles, vibrements divins des mers vir d d'animauc, paix des ride Paix des pitis semé Que V/alchimie imprime aux grands fn

‘

x

, supréme Clairon plein des stridewrs éeran Jes Ange Silences traverses des M —0 V}Oméga, rayon violet de Ses Yeux! analysis of this poem intriguing Reuven Tour's derlying analogy between the open and rangin; els andthe open and ranging “visual energy finds that vowels of indeterminate range, such

points to the work’s ur We ic ener hroughout T rnch e, are assoc

°

nrrin Te

ated with the med ing place of white on the color scale or with the "pas: oral calm” of green and blue, which are nearer the short-wave end of the spectrum, whereas intense and extreme vowel sounds, such as the highi in Romance languages, are associatedv h red, the color with the longest wave on the spectrum. Tsur also considers how associations with the meaningof words (e.g., clairon with the clear blue sky) and effectsof clus: ters of nouns (blanc/blew and rouge/jour) all contribute to the synesthe-

sia af color and sound as well.* Uf we look briefly at some other poems fusing sound and color, we see the continuity of these conventions of increased and diminished intensification. Federico Garcia Lorea’s “Romance Sonambulo, “with its bypnotic op line—"Verde que te quiero verde”—derives a beautiful set of variations from the increasing intensity of these ini al vowel sounds © toa to , proclaiming “Green how much | want you green.” The vowels ‘mount in intensity and then return to¢ as the color name repeated. But of course the poem also acquires its resonant “greenness” from the juxta positio of the sweeping n natural landscape, all spread with green, and the painted” figure of the dreaming gypsy: “verde came, pelo verde / con ojos de fria These cold silver eyes put the green into relief. By juxtapo: sition with the reflection of silver, the absorbing, world-devouring power of gre becomes clearer: 6 cosas la estan mirando / y ella no puede mirarlas" (all things look at her / but she cannot see them).* Something of the same absorption and reflection contrastis present at the beginningof Rafael Alberti’s “Rojo,” one of his early color poems from the series "A la Pintura” of 1948; 1 Lucho en ef verdede la fruta'y venza Plena rubor redondo en lam

Here as well a repetition of the o sounds of rojo, spaced at the beginning, and end of the first line and then clust ed at the front of the second, adds to the effect of meaningor discovery of the fruit, that concentration of red niess in the midst of the green leaves.2* In a final example, taken from a poet who was primarily @ painter, we oan see a brilliant use of par lels of intensity between the vowel and color spectrums once again, The Scuola Romana painter Gino Bonichi, who uused the name “Scipione” for his artistic endeavors, wrote only ten poems during his brief life, but these have an extraordinary sense of color imag-

ery. One of them, "Sento gli strilli degli angioli,” provides fu

af the association betwe n the hig

J and the color red:

strillideg angiol & dolce smala saliva

se pervade

beat

Whenever a poetic values metaphor, or the supersensible dimension of poetry tore generally, sound as the material manifestation of the work will be less emphasized, often sound will be held in diminished estim tion of poetry aver

music in the

“Analytic of the Sublim

Among all the arts olds the highest rank: {it owes its orig by precept or ¢ dance ope most entirely to genius an a In expands th the imagination th us, from among the unlimited variety of pos ible forms that harmon with a given though within chat concept’s limits, that for which links the exhibition of the concept with a wealth of thought t ti is completely adequate, and no linguistic expression tehich bets the ind: fori to ideas. Poetry fortif aesthetically its ability—free, spontaneous, and independentof natural determ

1at natute does not on its own olfer in experience either to sense oF to the understanding, and hence poetry lets the mind feel its ability to use ‘ture on behalf of and, as it were, as a schema of the supersensible

In contrast, music, as an art of tone, “speaks through nothing but sen sations without concepts, so that unlike poetry it leaves us with nothing to meditate about." Kant does emphasize, however, that the transience of music makes it “agitate the mind more diversely and intensely.”* Hegel's The Philosophy of Fine Art promotes a similar view of the relation be: tween the sensible and the thought in poetry: Mind, in short, here determines this content for its own sake and apart from all else into the content of idea; t express such idea it no doubt avails itself of sound, but employs it merely as a sign without indepen: dent worth or substance, Thus viewed, the sound here may be just as well reproduced by the mere lette, for the audible, like the visible, is here te duced to a mere indication of mind. For this reason, the true medium of | representation is the poetical imagination and the intellectual presentation itself and inasmuch as this element is common to all types of atti follows that poetry is a common thread through them all, and is developed independently in each, Poetry is, in short, the universal art of which has become essentially free, and which is not fettered in its realization w n externally sensuous material.” Yet as Kant's position gives us clue that the intensity of affect in music

might lend somethingof its emotional force to the sonorous dimension of the poctic, so does Hegel’s position stray so far from the reception of particular instancesof the poetic that poetry threatens to disappeat entirely as it makes its way toward the universal Neoclassical theories considering sound as a mode of ornament can make meaning seem ornamental as well: “When Alexander strives some rock’s vast weight to throw / The line too labors, and the words move slow.” Is Alexander, then, the example of the sound or the sound the e ample of Alexander? Although Pope has complained only a few lines ear lier about the “sure returns of still expected rhymes," there is such ease to his own perf + thymes that we wonder whether self-parody is really the point." Conversely, avant-garde materialism in twentieth-centuty po¢tics (the Symbolist ideal of fusing meaning and sound as expressed in VerJaine's “Art Poetique,” F. T. Marinetti’s “bruitisme,” or Dada sound poems) with its pursuit of pure sound finds itself readily encapsulated into

prior generic conven ‘nonsense” discourse or experimental music. A und poem” such as Hugo Ball's adit beri bimba slander lauli lonai eadori gadhama bim beri glass slandridi glas ala eutfm i zimbrabim blassa galassasa tuffm 1 zimbrabim reverses the conve1 onal priorityof meaning over sound. Ball wrote in his autobiey raphy, Flight Out of Time, “Thave invented a new genreof ‘Verse ohne Worte’ [poems without words}, or Lautgedichte {sound po: ems], in whichthe balance of the vowels is weighed and distributed solely accordin to the values of the begi writing secondhand: that is, accepting words (to say nothingof sentences! that are not newly invented for our own use,”" Significantly, the impro: visatory aspect of such a poem makes it a challenge to relies on the “placing” or contextualization of language in relation to other language, and “pure” sounds are indeed pure of such context. They are harder to call to m: cd than musical sequences, for musical sequences are themselves coded in relation to expectations of musical sequence Ball's demand that language be "newly invented” depends on the novelty and surprise produced by the unpredictability of the sequence. A claim is, made for the “pure” incantatory experience of the sound poem, but the theory nevertheless is used as a frame for the sound. Furthermore, since we have prior speech experience of these s discernible phones, if not as discernible words, we “hear” themp cally. The few repetitions in Ball’s poem and the sequence time compel us to hear aural connections, as in the sequence of firs are heard as deploying words” of the “lines” —gai gadjama—which suffix variations, or the way blassa and galassasa aper as prefix vari tions, or the repetitions of glandridi, glassala, and the pase” tuffini zimbrabim, or the variations in “a" and “i endings, w In other Latinate noun and pronoun endings for gender and number. words, we produce phonemes whenever we can, even if the lexical level by the intervals between clusters of syl onlyned remains opaque, here defi lables rather than by prior reference. A student of historical lings

comingupon this poem would know that itis closer to Italian, Frene Japanese than to English because of its emphasis on syllabies. The mind is

though Ball a grammar-making device, and itis difficult to turn it off, evn has not provideda syntactical framework of the kind maintained in Lewis

Carroll's “Jabberwocky, ”” where the connective words remain in the stanard lexicon. The first (which is again the last) “Jabberwocky” stanza will be enough to show this technique Twas brillig, and the slithy toves hid gere and gimble in the wabe All mimsy w the borogoves, And the yome taths outgrabe

We could conclude that Ball is performing a poem because he has framed his performance, he has spoken in “lines,” and “the work” has a begin: ning—if it does not have closure, it nevertheless does stop, Sounds follow other sounds and so appear in a relation to those sounds preceding and following them, Play within the determinations of such 4 relation will al ways be in tension with any “pure” arbitrariness, There are, then, a number of complex conditions under which we ean say that “sound” is and is not an aspect of poetry, When poetry is disseminated through written form, speech is represented through alphabetical letters and diacrit al marks and symbals; as systems of differentiated marks, these forms of representation stand for the differentiation of phones in sound production. Mast atures of spoken intonation, pitch, stress, and intensity must be suppliedby the reader. There is na reason to emaph the idiolectal quality of speech in this regard—phonetie patterns are learned at an early age for one’s own primary language and can be discerned for other inguages whether or not one actually “knows” the lan: guage,"? This is why a parrot will repeat phrases without what we might call a “parrot” accent, for the parrot is producinga string of phones, but human beings who learn languages after puberty will bring the inflection of that language or those languages they have first learned.” John Skelton’s clever macaronic poem, “Speak, Parrot,” written in 1519-1524 and published in 1554, makes a witty play on this feature of bird language from the “parrot's” point of view. Here is one of the parror's speeches from the opening stanzas: My lady mistress, Dame Philology, Gave me a gift, in my nest when [lay Tole 9 all Ianguage, an to speak aptly Now pande> mory, wax frantic, some men say, Phroneses for Preneses1 y wot hold her way An almond now for Parrot, delicately drest: {In Salve festa dies, toro there doth best.

As areader of poems takes up the sequence of written symbols, he « she thereby supplies the rhythm that characterizes his or her experienc nglish speakers the linguistic principle of tsock nism, which breaks utterances into segments correlated to the pulses of breathing, wil not be bass n the syllable (as itis in French, Japanese, and stress rather than from syllable to syllable, has of course had a profoun effect on English metrics. Becauseth generally fallson form words, rather than grammatical and structural elements, stress will underscor the structure of the grammar. In speech, stress can determine emphasis in ways that remain indeter minate to writing without the additic criti | marks: Did | It say hello to Tristan! Did Isolt say hello to Tei na m the acoustical “space,” the context whereinthe stres i ructed, bec the work ie form from title ar first line to closure, Writ ing in his Summa Lyrica, Grossman takes the consequences of stress even further and emphasizes the tension in English metrics between stress and syllabies: “Whe re is dispute about stress the reader need only accept as an obligation the semantic consequences of any given stressing Stress is the inscription of the subjective or meat the speaker (this is for the reader), We may disp count, by contrast, is by its nature at the other extreme of intersubjectis ity; It has the character of the ‘objective’ and we do not dispute about i only correct one another wit counting problem will be univocal, Stress is the point of presence of th hermeneut This rocessfrom sound production to inscription to re ception is pocked with anachronisms that in themselves are productiv historical meaning. Spelling, for example, always lags behind pronuncia tion,” off-rhyming can be taken as exact rhyming and vice versa; poetr sounds of a poem are not heard within the ro m af the poem, but they ar heard within a memory of hearing that is the total a rience of giver ata the listener in response to what knowledge «

Pauil Fussell’s century England “érom the Rest repetition in time

majesterial study of the theory argues that the ation to the n instead of

of prosod

theory could be paralleled by similar developments in the theory of music and dancing. In poetry and metrics, the shift is one from an attention to many minor unitsof time to a concern with only a few major units: from all syllables, that is, to only accented syllables as the marked and perceived units of temporal measurement,” Trisyllabic substitution called attention to: ajar syllables and allowed variety in the numbers of minor syllables to stich a degree that accentualism could return to dominate English poetry, here under what is often confusedly called the “accentualsyllabic” system that would conti ic through the nineteenth century until the Modernist innovation of free verse.!* Musical conventions proper have been applied to our sense of poetry's “musicality” yet do not overlap with poetry's meter even within the domain of spoken poems. It is not that some speech is organized rhyth mically and other speech is not. Victor Zuckerkandl has suggested that “whereas melody and harmony are essentially musical phenomena, native to the world of tone and not to be found elsewhere (the adjectives derived from these terms can be applied ony metaphorically outside the realm of music}, rhythm is a truly universal phenomenon . . rhythm is one manifestation of the reign of law throughout the universe.” Speech arrives in rhythmical form, and our experience of it cannot be separated from our knowledge of its rhythmical structure Zuckerkandl’s writings on music provide a number of valuable insights regarding these issues. He points to th important distinction be-n thythm and meter. Rhythm is described after the fact as the particular structure or order of tones in time. Although Zuckerkandl does not explicitly define rhythm as a historical and actual phenomenon, his emphasis on rhythm as the “living” dimension of music helps us see the tension between the organic and experiential unfolding of rhythm and the time” of meter—that fixed and ideal measurement by which we say we are “keeping time. Zuckerkand! in fact uses poetty as his example of an art form that uses both rhythm and meter and nevertheless constantly asserts the priority of rhythm over met poem is a rhythmic construction, . .. We could beat time to a poem if the syllables in it were all of equal length or departed from a basic unit in accordance with simple numerical proportions ‘Time’ and chythm here appear even to exclude each other: rhythm re‘sists regular time: ‘time’ appears to suffocate shythm.” He points out that except for the special case of dance music, which is obliged to conform to the bodily m nent it supports, musical rhythm in general is of the nature of the poetic rhythm, free rhythm in the sense that i i4 not con

strained to keep time. shackles of time, of met r,

‘There is one notable exception, Western music of upon itself, and

inde d at the same

moment

In lytic, then, especially, we find the continuance of a prepolyphoni emphasis on the individual voice and the tension between rhythm and meter. A key dir ter is not born in the beats at all, but in the empty intervals between the beats, in the places where ‘time merely elapses,’” writes Zuckerk "The mere lapse of time here effects something; it is felt as an event strictly speaking as a wave, In the macroscopic picture something else

happens; to the wave, intensification is added, As wave and intensification

the lapse of time sustains and nourishes the rhythmic life of music. The function of time here is, then, no longer that of the empty vessel, which tains the tor contrary, time intervenes, is directly active, in the musical context Meter igments, extends, and organizes our hearing of speech thythm i such a way as to intensify our experience—we hear the sound of ‘ound and become aware of the meaning af sound in consequence. "Meter separates. Rhythm is the unbrok draws boundary lines, interrupts, and continuity of a flux, such a continuity as the wave most graphically rep resents, .,, Meter is the repetition of the identical; chythm is return of the The sound of the poem emerges from this dynamic tension be similar.” tween the unfolding temporality of the utterance and the recursive tem

in th. of the form. There is something of this porality of the fixed aspects

multiple senses of the word itsel{—for sound as the most material and “superficial” dimension of speech is also sound as the measure, the dept thing the “sounding” of the material, as when we ask whether of sounds good” —that is, good enoughto act upon, hearing the integry a completed form. Because lyric maintains the convention of the individ ual speaking voice, a convention under which rhythm continues to hav the mechanical impositionof meter no matter how strong priority over organized the metrical dimension of the poem, it will not, in the Wester tradition, be sync mous with 1 uusic Another complexity of the relation between poetry and musicalit that the dynamic tension between sound and sema

comprehensive entry extend and diminish meaning, David 1, Mas on “sound” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, for example, delineates fifteen forms of “sound manipulation” that affirm the relation between sound and meaning in individual poems; structural em: phasis (thetarical addition to the formally required sound structure), underpinsing (subtle reinforcement of the verse structure through features like Milton's use of line-end consonance and assonance in blank verse}; counterpoising [sounds employed in opposition to the verse structure, as in imperfect rhymes used in line endings in combination with internal rhymes); rubricating emphasis or words or images (his examples come from Tudor echo effects, as in Henry Howard, earl of Surrey’s “The turtle to her make hath tolde her tale” where turtle, 10, told, and tale are in ef fect underlined by the sound), tagging |punctuation of syntax by words ‘or sounds}; correlation (indirect support of argument by related echoes implication {interconnection of sou vd, meaning and feeling); diagram ming {abstract pattern symbolizing sense—as in the relation between “leaping” syllables and “leaping” fire in Dryden's “He wades the Streets, and strcight he reaches cross”); sound representation (onomatopocial; il lustrative mime (mouth movements recall motion or shape}, illustrative painting (articulations, sounds and patterns correspond synesthetically to appea ances and nonacoustic sensations}; passionate emphasis (emotional outburst}; mood evoeation {choice of tone colors resembling the usual sounds expressed in a given emotion); expressive mime (mouth move: ments ape the expression of emotion, as in the spitting effects necessary for pronouncing Adam’s expulsion of the serpent in these lines from Milton: "Out of my sight, thou Serpent, that namebest / Befits thee with him eagu’d, thy self as false / And hateful”), expressive painting (sounds, articulations correspond to fe ings or impressions, as in George Crabbe’s And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day”), ebullience (pure exuberance or pleasure in sound}; embellishment (superficial musicality, as in Howard's application of a rubricating emphasis noved earlier), and in: cantation (musical or magical use of sound)," Such & taxonomy is helpful for understanding the effects of particular sounds in individual poems. Yet who is to say that W. B. Yeats's “That dolphin-tom, that gong-tormented sea” is an example of incantation, as it is for Masson, rather than embellishment of ebullience? Surely the most effective alignments of sound and meaning will use a number of these techniques. Furthermore, the relation between sound and meaning “created” by such lines depends on a prior expectation of a connection between sound and meaning, an expectation brought to the reading of poetry more generally, When Laura Riding and Robert Graves wittily suggest there is an ar-

, rather than onomatopoeic, relation between Alfred, Lord Tennyson's

sound and meaning in

The moan of d And murmuringof innumerable bees

the sounds produced in a line of different meaning ("More ordure never will renew our midden’s uure manure") * hardly pro:

duce a similar onomatopocic effect, they miss the point. Sounds in poems are never heard outside an expect jon of meaning, and sounds in n:

will be framed for human Listeners by hi man expectations. Robert Frost, in “The O Bird,” reminds us vividly that we hear even bird songs in terms of human phonemes—the robin's “cheer, cheer, cheer”, the night hawk’s “sp-e-e-d”; the nuthatch’s “yank, yank” or Henry David Thoreau’s suggestion that the song sparrow sings “Maids, maids, maids, hang up your teakettle—ettle—ettle.” When Frost writes of this bird who “knows in singing not to sing” but rather to frame questions, we silently “hear the song of the aven bird: “teach Such feat res of sound manipulation in poetry as counterpoising, tag, ging, echo effects, diagramming, and the “ornamental” devices of rubrica: tion and embellishment can, as David Masson emphasizes, make the r lation between sound and meaning particularly textured and complex. Yet hey also point to the possibilities of severi ning. Such a severing 4s pc ure of language forms. Long belore the insights of Saus: of the arbitrary surean linguistics, folk forms often pointed to this dilemma. Think of the legendsof Tom Tit Tot and Rumpelstiltsken: human beings will not be able to reproduce themselves (to name or claim their own offspring) until they use their intelligence to tease out a ompletely athitrary name for the source of their suffering, only language ean reveal to them the hid: den term. meaning to create Ballads, too, often stage the separationof sound and anticipation in the progress of narrative. For example, nonsensical sounds are used both to arrest and move forward the incremental repetitions of of the “Wife Wrapt in Wethers Skin,” collected in North Care this version

ichant) There was

an old man wh

n the West

chant) There was an old man who lived in the West sung) To my clash a-my kling

chant) ‘There was an old man who lived in the West fhant) He married hirn awife which he thoughtthe best | Lingarum, lingorum smikaroarum, kerrymingoram

This is a particularly rich example, for the ballad tetrameter is followed exactly in the first three chanted narrative lines, but the narrati e de velopment is halted uptil the fourth narrative line where the meter is abandoned. In the fourth line the only way to get a four-beat measure is to switch from ballad meter into pure accentual verse. In this the song, merges ballad form and the particu! 1 patternof repeated lines common to blues form, Meanwhile, the nonsense syllables, which, because they are sung, would be expected to be in the more regular meter, are not in any particular meter at all until the f al sung line “to my clash a-my klingo. The listener hears three chanted lines before the narrative starts and three sung lines before the meter starts. Few poets have been as engaged with song as Thomas F ly was ng life, Consider, for example, how hi es song techhout his niques in “During Wind and Rain They sing their dearest songs. of them—yea, reble and tenor and bass ‘And one to play With the car How

the sick leaves reel down in throng hey clear the creeping m Making the pathways neat And they build a shady seat hey are blithely breakfastingal: Men and maidens—yea, Under the summer tree With a glimpse of the bay

While pet fowl come to the knee Ah, no, the years 0} And the rotten rose is ript from the wall They change to a high new house He, she, al of them —aye Clocks and carpets and chai ings that are theirs Ah, no; the years, the years, Hardy uses the purely “emotional” tefrain "Ah, no; the years O! (changed in 1 a to “Ah, no, the years, the years”) to lend pa

ticular weight to the slowly building drama of the exclamatory last lr stanza; “How the sick leaves reel down in throngs Se , th white storm-birds wing across!”, “And the rotten rose is ript fr wall”, “Down their carved names th rain-drop ploughs.” In this wa the Last lines of the st of feeling, create a kind of trellisto support the emerging meaning of the poem, showing the deep dimension c time emerging out of what might by called the “ordinary” or everyday narratives describedin the lines preced. ing the refrain lines

Such juxtaposition of song and speech is typical

of ather forms as well

pieces, riddles, dialogue, sayings, imitations of animal sounds, or magical utterances; the speech sections will stage the scene and explain the nar set by rative. In ballad and song burdens, mood and place may an incantatory, evocative repetition: “Down by the greenwood side” or ‘Down by the green, by the burnie-o,’"** In the rubato-parlando style ofdra matic recitative found in much of Eastern European and Anglo-Americar

balladry in which the last words of the song are uttered as speech, speech to the threshold of reality; in consequence, singing is as arks the return iated with the incantatory, the sacred, and the imaginary The trajectories of speech and song are both opposed and complemen tary in such forms. The sounds of speech rhythmically proceed forward in time according to convent sns of articulation and interval. The sounds of song are organized both metodically andha linear and recursive fashion. and use fixed repetitive patterns of stress, tone, and duration.Speech disappears into the function of its situation

ean be repeated as fixed text or reported in an approximation. Song, by virtue of its measure, is fixed and repe ble, although it is, like all utter ances, subject to transformation.” Of course,the sweet new measures of

the relations between verse and discursive prose in Dante's Vita Nuova, which itself follows this device in Boethius’s Consolation of Phtlosophy, remain the prototype for Western poetry that foregrounds the ten: sions between singing and speaking. Much of the later Romantic artifactualization of poetry within poetic forms, such as the juxtaposition of tetrameter song and pentameter speech in poems like Coleridge's “Kubla Khan” and Charlotte Turner Smith's “Beachy Head,” is a legacy of Dante’s innovations Yet the simultaneous appearance of the unfolding semantic pressureof speech and the asemantic pulse of measure may also be said to define the possibilities of poetic art more broadly, W. K. W: mnsatt wrote of this tension between meaning and arbitrariness in The Verbal Icon, “Verse in gen. ral, and more particularly rhyme, make their special contribution to poetic structure in virtue of a studiously and accurately semantic character. They impose upon the logical pattern of expressed argument a kind of fixative counterpatternof alogical implication,” Telling as telling slant makes lyric capable of evoking not only meaning but also the conditions under which meaning is formed by human speakers, There isan axiological consequence to this account of poetry. Poetry that mechanically emphasizes the fulfillment of metrical expectations will result in mere “tub-thumping,” ax Robert Lowell described the four: teeners of Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses “Even if one is careful not to tub-thump, as one reads Golding’s huge, looping, ‘fourteeners,' for ‘sense ax syntax’ as Pound advises, even then one trips, often the form seems like some arbitrary and wayward hurdle, rather than the very backbone of what is heing said.”*! John Thompson, in a discussion of this passage in his work on The Founding of English Meter, suggests that the early Elizabethans may not have had the same diificulty in keeping poulter’s measure from overwhelming the grammatical and logical structure of the language, But he also explains that whenever there are balanced contours in evenly spaced rhythm units that dom: inate units of the langua ge, “singsong” will result. If such a reification of meter results in an overwhelmed semantic level, similarly a semantic level organized without considerationof metrical counterpatterning will be absorbed into mere rhetoric. Any poetry produced under conditions that suppress the recursive and patterned dimensions of form ca snot hope to move the ader or listener beyond the expect tions: of speech absorbed into the time of everyday life.

When Wimsatt mentions “a counterpattern of al

metrical pattern is counter and what is so alogical about meter’s implications. The pattern of logical im plication in speect

di 6 and element a certain consequence will fol like 5 face-t ‘ommunication of everyday life, is articu: lated in time, But unlike speech oriented toward conversational purposes, speech in-a poem is not absorbed in time. Essentialist arguments that negate any purported differences between “ordinary” and “poetic!” lan: guage always already cheat in this re jor attending to ordinary language in order to emphasize its inherently “poetic” quali synon mous with poiésis in the first place and imagining “ordinary” functions for poetic utterances "I'd liketo go out tonight, but I'm feeling half in love with easeful death”) is inseparable from the fabrication of fictive contexts. oO one is involved in such self-conscious making, there is no return tc the contingencies of mere “func Attention to the material elements of form in both its production and reception moves counter to that temporal absorption; indeed, attention to the material elements of form threatens to halt reception and to domin: the semantic dimension. This threat demands a certain complex kind of apprehension wherein the logical implication, the implication of the rea son, is put into play with the recursive and repetitive y of the me ter, Here is the compulsion of meter to return, to reenact, to transiorm ani imitate. A tension ensues between the intentional and volitional dimen. sions of both sound production and listening and the involuntar n sion of hearing —the unregulated openness of the ear to the world and the finite nuance of the unsaid, Meter, and song as its vehicle tory of the reason, Meter dis: rupts the absorptive dominance of time and makes time manifest as the as the phonemic dimension of sound only comes into existence as tem of differences, so the rests and caesuras,the line and stanza breaks of voice ren d. Through poems the human ems are “sun silence acts the conditions of its emergence from silence and wrests that into the intersubjective domain of made and shaped thir Keeping time" in poetry, unlike keeping time in postpolyphonal a reduction of soun Western music, does not involve s metrical grid. Keeping time in poetry is exercis voice manipulating duration in such a way as to produce }

a finite auditory withinng ion of heari

space. When

invocatory drive as one of going out and coming back, he is careful to spec: ify that this movement is not a matter¢ “a reciprocity,” for the pure tivity of the drive isnot “balanced” by the narcissistic field of love; what ‘goes out overwhelms what comes back—what goes out is constant and in: excapable, whereas what comes back is contingent and determined, Here we find the incommensurablerelation between productionand reception

as 3 “nonreciprocal” production in its own right, This incommensurabil ityisnota arrier to some recuperable originary meaning; it is in itself the ‘mishearing” or “mistecognition” under which the material element of the siga acquires an untotalizable semantic dimension. Poets who worried the relation between sound and sense—the slant and off-rhymes of Emily Dickinson and Wilfred Owen, the use of “noise” in Hart Crane, the coiningof neologisms in Paul Celan and César Vallejo—have provided a vivid commentary on the alienation that can arise between speakers on the one hand and between human beings and nature on the other, It is significant that these are also poets for whom the stance of the “natural person,” or any enthusi sm in the presentation of the self, is unbearable: Let us look at two well-known poems by Wallace Stevens, one that primarily is sound and one that primarily is about sound. The first is Ploughing on Sunday” from Han The white cock’s tail Tosses in the wind, The turkey-cock’s tail Glitters in the sun w The wind The feathers Hare And bluster in the wind. Ploushing Blow y

North America

The turkey-cock’sta Spreads to the sun

The white cock Water in the fields,

How can we begin to account for all that is happenin in the sound of this poem? Harmonium asa wh panoply of joyful noises, a fabulous excursus on the relations between sounds in nature, human vocalization, and music, Its harmony is buile fr 4 cacophony of elaviers, pianos,

oboes, mandolins, guitars, bird songs, glossolalia, and cries. “Peter Quince at the Cl jer” realizes that “music isfeelin 1" And the very last poem of the 1922 Harmonium, "To the Roaring Wind,” 1s a con

densed ode to the Romantic invocation of the wind itself as inspiriting spirit of sound:

What syllable are you seeking Vocalissimus In the distances of sleep: Speak it The title of “Pl xaghing on Sunday” might be read in the other direc tion—against the very first poem of the volume, "Earthy / date where the bucks clattering aver Oklahoma constantly swerve to the right

and then and both

then to the left in the left, evokes the plowing. The Greek the turning of oxen

“swift circular lines“ Swerving to the right, long-standing Western relation between poetry Savarpoynddv (boustrophedon) describes adverb in ploughing and writing from left to right and right to left in alternation. This deep analogy between the ning that

opens the earth to the sky and the turning that inseribes the page with a

record of human movement is carried forwa n the notion of verse as a series of turns and in the circling recursivityof al lyric forms. Here, too, the nystagmus, # back-and-forth motion of the eyes, is emphasized as a process of reading and hearing at once. Reversals of direction of many kinds are relevant here, For example, we might recall "the sun came up upon the left” and “the sun came up upon the right’—lines 29 and 81, respectively, of Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Stevens,

the weekend poet, often “ploughed on Sunday.” The interdiction again on the Sabbath that we might hear from “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman” is violated by Stevens, who con Poetry is ul supreme fiction, Madame, / Take the moral law and make nave of i

And from the naye build haunted heaven. Thus / the conscience is converted into palms, / Like windy citherns hankering for hymns."*" On its spindle of meaning, “Ploughing on inday” places just a few threads, The scene evokes a period after a storm—water is in the fields, making the labor of plowing all the more difficult; the wind is still “pour: ing down,” implying that, in taking on what we would expect to be the function of the rain, wind is now doing the work of water. The white cock and the turkey cock are out in this weather, as they would not be in a storm, and the sum is now shining. What is the relation between a white cock (which would be some variety of a white leghorn rooster, given its coloration and the fact that it has a tail that can be tossed and streamed — perhaps a Rhode Island White! and a turkey cock (which glitters because its spreading fan-shaped tail feathers have hints of gold and bronze—perhaps a Narragansett Black)? The wind pouring down is paralleled by another wind—the blustering human breath “Remus” must gather to play his horn, announcing that the speaker is “ploughing on Sunday | Ploughing North America.” And who is Remus? The wolf-suckled Abel figure of Roman legend? The “Uncle Remus” of Joel andler Harris's stories that also ate structured by the relations between animal and human life and often involve other “characters” we find in Stevens's poem: “Mr, Sun,’ "Sister Moon,” and "Uncle Wind”? The final stanza reverses the order of precedence between the white cock and the turkey cock. The turkey cock remains, spreading his glittering tail in the sunlight, while the white cock streams to the moon and the plowing has gone on into the night, The poem's closure 1 sts on the meaning of the close of day and, contiguously, the rooster’s association with the threshold between night and daybreak. Describing the poem in conventional metrical terms does not get us very far, The pure stress totrameter quatrains make some use of a play be tween rising and falling meters. Such meters alternate in the first stanza, there is a repetition of two trochees and a spondee between the last line of

the first stanza and the first line of the second stanza, and an inversion ap: pears (three iambs into two troche and a spondee| between the last line

of the second stanza and the first line of the third stanza, These “turns” between rising and falling meters add to the charming effect of plowing — albeit under serious conditions of weather."* The speaker is working on

steadily, and everything is being transformed: the water evaporates into wind and the wind pours down, There is no exact rhyming, but there are important instances of mirroring and inversion of sound and meter. "SPreaDs to the SuN” and “STreaMs to the MooN" are lines with the same meter, but they also play complexly with parallel sounds, The bila bial p isto the alveolar d as the alveolar is to the bilabial m. We could say

that “sun and moon’ already appear as an off-rhyme in experience and that in the course of time the moon alwaysfollows the sun. Yet as well, the bilabial appears then as the resolving turn after the alveolar Simple acrostic changes af sound patterns are at work in the turn between DoWN" and “WiND” and the slanted use of the cognates t and I in the change from “FeaTheRs” to “FLaRe Col ridge wrote in his “Table-talk" of 20 August 1833, “Brute animals have vowel sounds; man only can utter consonants. It is natural, therefore that the consonants should be marked first, as being the frameworkof the word; and no doubt a very simple living language might be written quite intelligibly to the natives without any vowel sounds m ed at all, The words would be tra hand us: Gd ertd th hyn nd th rth,"*? But our anthropomorphization of animal sounds frequent attributesto animals the articulation of conso: nants. We know, for example, from anot poem in Mi um, “De pression before Spring,” that Wallace Stevens's roosters can sing the syllables "Ki ki ro ki." Following a pioneering essay on “Musical Verse by Kenneth Burke and further recent work by Tsur on sound patterns and expression, we might look more closely in this vein at the sound patterns, in the poem.“ The first a literally bristles with an inverted play upon the “kiki ro ki” (here ko ko ri ke af the white cock: The white CO-CKs tail t0stes the tuR|KIEY COCK’ tai Glitters in the sun

The turkey cock’s “gobble” makes an appearance in th hardg and J but the b does not appear; the stanza's consonants remain enti in the alveolar, velar, and pack-velar region. There is not a simple bilabial or labiodental sound in the entire stanza. But the bilabials return dramati osives in the third st a with the bi and pl! sounds indicating Remus's blowing of his horn Remus BLow your hom I'm PLoughing on Sunday Ploughing Ne th America

here. And when, in the poem’s le] activities Blowing and plowing are its news—“Tum-ti-tum / Ti-tum-tum. climactic moment, the horn plays

tum*—all the instruments, the alveolars and the bilabials, are brought to the fore. In his choice of b and p as contrasting phonemes, Stevens returns to a common, but by no means invariable, primitive structure of rly sound production, Infants align random sounds into fundamental groups that contrast with one another in terms of articulating mechanisms, and the difference between voiced b bilabials and unvoiced p bilabials is fre ly of choice.*! quent the alignment If Harmonium is Stevens's exploration of the emergence of human sounds from nature, many of the poems in Transport to Summer address the cultural meanings of sounds and the relations among naming, calling, and speech. The poem “Certain Phenomena of Sound” begins with forms cof sound play based on the phonemesof the “Ploughing on Sunday” t that is, mostly alveolars (ens!) and velars (ka): THe CriCKeT oN THe TeLePHoNe 1S STILL A GeRaNiuM WiTHERSoN THe WiNDoW SiLL

But the last stanza empha: s the invocatory relation between naming and being: “you were created of your name, the word /1s that of which you were the personage / There is no life except in the word of it One of Stevens's most rigorous and complete statements on the rela tion between sound and poetry can be found ina consequent poem in Transport to Sumer, “The Creations of Sound," The poem takes up the idea of the relation between persons and language in a complex way that wedges the necessary separation between speaking in poems and speaking to represent ourselves. The poem is a powerful critique of the “Poet X” who claims a connection between the spontaneity of his poetic art and the intrinsic nature of his person, This simple idea of Romanticexpressivity is an anathema to Stevens, whois far more interested in the way poetic expression frees us from the bonds of lived experience and reified personality. The close of the poem gives instructions for correcting such a Romantic error Tell X that speech is not dirty silence Clarified, Ie is silence made still dirtier It is more than an imitation for the ear

He lacks this venerable complication, His poems are not of the second part of life They do not make the visible a little hard

Ta see nor, rev ing. eke out the mind (On peculiar horns, themselves eked out By the spontan us particular of s sound

We do not say ourselves like that in poems We say ourselves in syllables that rise From the floor, rising in speech we do not speak

Ina number of ways, this poem is the theory of which “Ploughing on Sunday” and the peculiar horn of Remus is the practice. But the poem is

not a work of prose discourse, It is itself a poem and its structure is built,

as if it had descended from Herbert's The Temple as an architectural con. ceit. The close of the poem completes the extended metaphor: poems are made from the syllables that rise from the floor and not from the music of the alls and the ceiling, The Poet X makes the solipsistic error af con:

fusing the expression of his feelings {which we know in Stevens's register are synonymous with music] with the work of the poet. The poet works from the received foundationof speech—out of this inheritance, the poet makes another self, an eidetic self estranged from mere authorship. We

do not “speak” from speech, rather, it is already waiting to speak us, both to enunciate our being and to enable us to remake and extend ourselves, In poems we “ek out the mind” on "peculiar horns, and spontaneity be longs to the parti ars of sounds, not to the intended gestures of human beings Such a theory of sound returns us to Adorno’s point that in the great est lyric works it is language itself that is speaking and changing, And it also returns us to our earlier discussion of the assumption of persona as the assun ion of poetic voice. In a general survey of North Am rican mythology, written in 1914, Franz Boas describes the use of changes in speech as a means of representing characters who are neither the n: or speaker: “Another artistic device that is used by py tribes to

in the characterization of the actors [in verbal art forms} is tificial changes in speech. Thus among the Kwakiutl the pronounce the sound ts, amor the Kutenai Coyote cannot among the Chinook the animals speak different dialects. called attention to the development of this feature among

the use of ar

Mink cannot pronounce s,

Dr. Sapir has the Shoshoni

Lest we think that such a tec que is only used in the and Nootka,’”® representation of animal characters, we might remember that Charles

Dickens invented what seem to be genuinely idiolectal features of speech as.a device of characterization throughout his novels.® No one would ever

accuse Dickens of forgetting to eke out the mind on the most peculiar horns Il.

Hopkins: Invocation AND LisTENING

Stevens's meditationson sound have every confidence in the ability of po: etry to sound its way into significance, But now T want to go back to the late nineteenth century to a poet who made sounding a much more problematic activity, returning us to the very origin of the appearance of the invocatory drive and linking the sounds of suffering to the sounds of poetic making in profound ways. My focus will be Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘desolate sonnets” of 1885, Hopkins's writings on poetics, informed by his deep knowledge of clas sical literature and his skills as a musician and draftsman, constantly return to the relation among sound, meter, and emotion. In his lecture notes on “Rhythm and the Other Structural Parts of Rhetorie—Verse,” Hopkins defines verse as a "figure of spoke: sound”: “verse is speech having a marked figure, orde of sounds independent of meaning and such as can be shifted from one word or words to others without changing." He ereates a taxonomy of possible kinds of verse by “the kinds of resemblance possible between syllables: musical pitch or tonic accent; length or time or quantity so called; stress or emphatic accent; likeness or sameness of letters, vowels ar consonant initial or final {alliteration}; holding, break and circumflexion, slurs, glides, slides ete.” He contrasts quantification of syllables (as in classical verse} with len ring (early English alliteration} the first “running” and the second “intermittent,” explaining that stress is between these two, with English verse characterized by a strong stress and weak pitch.” In further notes, he explains that "all poetry is not verse ‘but all poetry is either verse or falls under this or some still further devel: opment of what verse is, specch wholly or partially repeating some kind of figure which is over and above meaning, at least the grammatical, his. torical and logical meaning."** Yet here what seems to be a technical definition of the relation between syllabification and metrical systems, and a separation of the material and semantic aspects of poetry, is for Hopkins part of a complex metaphysic he has borrowed from Parmenides and combined with Christian, particularly Ignatian, theology. In Hopkins’s notes on Parmenides, he particularly singles out the ways “the phenomenal world (and the distinction between men or subjects and the things without them} is unimportant in Parmenides: the contrast is between the one and the many is the brink,

limbus, lapping, run-and-mingle or two principles which meet in the scape of everythit proba Being, under its modificationor siding of particular oneness or Bei and Not-being, under its siding of the Many The two may be call two degrees of siding in the scale of Being, Fore: shortening and equivalency will explain all possible difference. The inscape will be the proportion of the mixture Iris in these notes on Parmenidles that we find the earliest evidence of Hopkins’s use of what were to become key terms in his work: “anscape” and “instress,” Althoughhe uses these words almost colloquially and does not provide a clear definitionof them, he usually implies by inscape the characteristic shape or pattern of a phenomenon; he describesin his jour nal the ways in which fine “stems” of a cloud can change into images of ribs or coral: “Unless you refresh the mind from time to time you cannot always remember or believe how deep the inscape of things is.” Instress is thi identifying impression a thing can communicate and is associated with emotion; as a "stress within,” it is a force binding something or a per son into a unit."! Being and not-being, the one and the many, the con: stantly changing aspect of things—"the brink, limbus, lapping, run-and: mingle,” which induces in the pi tional response.” This way of seeing the phenomenal world cannot be separated in Hopkins’s thoughtan «practice from the running and intermittent aspeets of English speech as they are used the poe by torquinj stress and pitch, deploying sprung rhythm as the reawakened tension be ecentual and accentual syllabic traditions, Hopkins is able to

invent a mode of poetic utterance that will serve his philosophy of per ception and representation Consider, for example, two uses of the term siding that appears first in the Parmenides discussion quoted earlier. In a journal entry of 13 June tes, “A beautiful instance of instape sided on the slide, that

is / successive sidings of one inscape, is seen in the beha jour of the flag flower from the shut bud to the full blowing: each term you can distin. and of course if the whole ‘behaviour’ were gath: guish is beautiful in itself A up and so stalled it would have a beauty of all the higher degree." ered second example comes from the discussi n of the definition of verse in the "{the figure of spoken sound] must be repeated lecture notes on thythm: nce, that is / the figure must occur at least twice, so that it may be de! ned/ Spol n sound having a repeated figure. (It is not necessary that em any whole should be repeated bodily, it may be sided off |Hopkins’s phasis), as in the metres of chorus, butthen some common measure namely the length or strength of a beat etc,, recurs) In addition to the “siding” of the metrical scheme, caesura can break

up the rhythm into “sense-words of different lengths from sound-words, alliteration and skothending (the Icelandic practice of ending with the same consonant, but after a different vowel] can break up the run of the sense with intermittent sound; open sounds can be transtormed by vow: elling on {assonance) or vowelling off (changing the vowel down some ‘scale or strain or keeping’),” Hopkins made lists of words of similar sound, listening for semantic connections between them, as in “drill, trill, thrill, nostril nese-thirl.” “Common idea piercing, To drill. in sense of discipline, is to wear down, work upon. Ci, o bore in sl igsense, wear, grind, So tire connected with tero, "In the end there is little difference between sense” and “sound” words as words “tone up” or vary the implications of sound and m ining. Hopkins pointedly remarks that “these various means of breaking the sameness of rhythm and especially caesura do not break the unity of the verse but the contrary, they make it organic and what is organic is one Asa figure of spoken sound, the poem produces effects of transformation in sound, it does not fix the terms of utterane: it becomes in itself a living, breathing, phenomenon. The technique works by lending emotional stress to the otherwise inherent qua ties of speech: “Emotional in: tonation,”" he notes, “especially when not closely bound to the particular words will sometimes light up notes on unemphati¢ syllables and not fol low the verbal stressesand pitches.” In a New Year's Day letter to Robert Bridges in 1885, Hopkins des ‘bes the alexandrine: “there is accord ing to my experience, an insuperable tendency to the Alexandrine, so far, T'mean, as this, that there is a break after the third foot cutting the line

into equal halves. .. .Thaye found that this metre is smooth, natural and easy to work in broken dialogue. . . . In passionate passages 1 employ

sprung rhythm in it with good effect.” In April he suggested that in regard to alexandrines, “as the feeling rises the rhythm becomes freer and more sprung, The emotional resources of meter are paramount for Hopkins; he is able to use the rhythms of speech as a kind of backdrop against which the emotions play their changes in stress and emphasis, In his lecture notes on rhythm, he explained how the syllabic, lexical, ind “emotional” levels of the poem could be in dynamic tension We may think of words as heavy bodies, as indoor or aut of door objeets of nature or man’s art. Now every visible palpable body has a centre of grav’ ity round wl fn itis in balance and a centre of illumination or highspot (or quickspot up to which it is lighted and down from which it is shaded.

The centre of gravity is Itke the accent of stress, the highspot like the pitch, for pitch is like light and colour stsess like weight and as in some things as air andwater the centre of yravity is either unnotice: able or changeable $0 there may be languagesin afluid state in which there is light difference of weight or stress between syllables or what there is changes and again as it is only glazed bodies that shew the high: English is of this kind, the accent of stress strong, that of pitch weak Emotional intonation, especially when not closely bound to particular words, will sometimes light up notes on unemphatie syllables and not follow the verbal stresses and pitches." Stress is like the weight or volume of water and air here; pitch like the glancing play of light or color on the surface of water and other “glazed objects, Against this ge fal theory of stress and piteh, Hopkins created ef fects particular to the emotional valences of in lividual lines. Consider the tension between the standard readi the stress at the closure of “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves,” Hopkins’s medi tation on doomsday; “thoughts against choughts in sroans grind’ is heard against the mounted stress Hop. kins marks for the line—“thouights agdinst thoughtsfn groans grind It is as if, at the end of this sonnet, Hopkins were stripping the gears of sound. By putting the emphasis on the in, Hopkins makes us push down and groans, forcing down our voices the emphasison the seco di the and foregrounding the carrying over of sound from in to grind. It is not so much that there is a slight change of semantic emphasis, which of course there is, but that we must go against our inclinations, against ourselves everything in speech is made hard or di cult Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves,” bi gun at the end of 1884 and completed in 1886, is atransitional poem «duced in a periodof pessimism that would of 1885: “To seem the t “desolate” or “terrible” sonnets in Hopkins’s resul stranger,” “I wake an feel the fell of dark, not day,” “No worst there is none,” “Carrion Comfort,” “Patience, hard thing,” and “My own heart Because these poems existed only in manuscript at the time of Hopkins’s or prepared fo. uublication by Hopkins, we do death and were never dated not know the order in which he wrote them. They scem to have been com, posed between January and August of that year." A great deal has been written about these son , They mark the end of Hopkins's intense in volvement with describing -xternal nature; they appear during a period ding his situation as a teacher and examiner in classics at of de

the Royal University, an English Catholic posted in Ireland. His health was poor, and his eyesight was failing him, He wrote in his journal, “be ing unwell I was quite downeast: nature in all her parcels and faculties gaped and fell apart, fatiscebat, like a clod cleaving and holding only by strings of root,"* ‘The 1885 sonnets and “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” follow Hopkins’s reading of Ignatius’s instructions for meditating on sin and hell in his Spit. itual Exercises of 1541. The role of sound here becomes foregrounded in such a way as to obviate any distinction hetween the form and theme of the poetry. The poems obey the Ignatian mandate of "imitatio Christi”— the imitation of Christ's sui ing. a serious mimicry that is a form of in. carnation as Christ himself incarnated, or was inhabited by, both divine and human being. As an “experiment”—although such a word hardly begins to approach the stakes involved for Hopkins—these poems make a formidable contribution to our understandingof the possibilitiesof sound in lyric. Yet Hopkins'’s 1885 poems also, and foremost, work through the ca acity of sound in the sonnet—the “son” taking place in a confined room —to express mental despair, Norman White's biography of Hopkins quotes 4 1953 book by Denis Meadows, Obedient Men, which describes the Jesuit novitiate’s exercise on hell, a composition of place required by the 1541 Exercises: He "We must take each of the senses in turn. First, says St Ignatius, you see the fire, and the souls as though in bodies of fire. With your ears you hear the wailing, howling, and blasphemy of the lost ones. You smell the sulphur, smoke and putrescence of hell. Then you taste in imagination the bitterness of tears, sadness, and conscience ever remo s ful, ever unabsolved, yet ever in rebellion. Last of all, you feel the fire touching and burning even an immaterial entity like the soul.”*° The use of the term exercise indicates, then, a method of self-transformation, or unmaking and remakingof the self. In Hopkins’s own commentary on Ig: natius's prescription, he wrote, “Sight does not shock like hearing, sounds cannot so disgust as smell, smell is not so bitter as proper bitterness,

which is in taste...

still bitterness of taste is not so cruel as the pain that

can be touched and felt. Seeing is believing but touch is the trath the say-

ing goes.” The function of the “exe ise” was not to distance one’s self

and so acquire an encompassing view of hell but rather to experience, and engage, the sufferings of the lamned After the “lonely began” of "To seem the stranger,’ “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day” introduces the onset of hell’s night —where light, the instrament of reason, should be, touch discovers the fall of the night and the animal pelt of the darkness:

Twake and feel the fell of dark What hours, O what black hours we have spent This night! what sights you, heart, saw, ways you went! And more must, in yet longer light’s delay

With witness I speak this. But where Isay Hours I mean years, mean life. And my la Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent To dearest him that Lives alas! away 1am gall, 1am heartburn. God's most deep decree Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me Bones built in me, flesh filled, blo d brimmed the curse Selfyeast of spirit P a dul dough urs. sours. 1 sce The lost are like this, and their scourge to be AsTam mine, their sweating selves, but worse Because fel also means “a blow,” it is symptomatic of originary suf and sin: Adam's curse, the murder of Abel, the “long night" “full of tossing until dawn’ of Job 7:4, Hopkinscontinues to link bitterness and orality in “Bitter would have me taste: my taste wasme; Bones built in me, flesh filled, blo xd brimmed the curse.” When in the last stanza Hopkins ends first line “I see,” he again interrupts the com nuity of sight—the line break turns into a kind of trick, for the line ontinues, “I see / the lost are like this.” In his sermons, Hopkins associated sight with continuous apprehension and hearing with intermittent apprehension. Sight is, however, intermittent in hell and linked to the invisibility of sin In his commentary on the exercise, Hopkins writes of the sinners “im. nomenon of foiled ac prisonment in darkness . .. for darkness is the tion in the sense of sight. .. . But this constr aint and this blindness or darkness will be most painful when it is the main stress or energy of the whole being that is thus balked. Hence, this thwarted, balked stress or energy of being is expressed in a continuous, and continuously painful, form of utterance that is the sonnet itself. “I wake and feel” uses sound pairs—"feel the fell,” “sights saw, “ways went,” “Vonger lig t,” “cries countless,” “alas away,” “gall heart burn,” “deep decree,” “bitter taste,” “bones built,” “flesh filled,” “blood

“selfyeast of spirit,” “a dull dough, “lost like,” and “sweating brimmed,” selves"-—that are also semantic pairs: nouns are o

ceded by adverbs functioning as adjectives. In this way, a quality of an

96

Cuarren Tw

object is put into a dynamic relation with it, transforming it as that qual ity adheres to, or becomes part of, its structure and so continuing the “sid ing” process Hopkins pursued since his early studies of Parmenides. But here this “siding” is not a joyful insight into the transformative dimen: sions of nature. Indeed, the poem is literally “wracked” on the level of sound. What Kenneth Burke had described as “musical effects” in € ridge’s poetry are here a form of physical torture. Compression, as in “NighT" to "weNT"; inversion, as in“ muST” to "lighT’S" and “SaW" to ‘WayS"; augmentation, as in “iN yeT IoNger lighT,” are not expressive of musical s sat ns so much as symptoms of a dire tension, a "failed action,” that seems to be punctuated by human cries. These cri move con certedly from an emphasis on the “bright vowels” # and e at the start of the poem to the dark vowels u and o, which become more emphasi ed in the final ewo stanzas.” The singularity and futility (“cries like dead letters sent” of mortalen tities are brought to an abrupt halt, a final judgment: “but worse,” What does it mean for Hopkins to say that his “cries” are “like dead letters sent "To dearest him that lives alas! away”? Whether “dearest him” is God, or Christ, or Robert Bridges, or some other interlocutor, he is not present— neither within the range of the speaker's cries nor available as the recipient of a letter. There is no “delivery” from torment; here the tautological consequences of sin are expressed as a tautology of the poet speaking to and for himself: "my taste was me"; “selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours.” Hopkins wrote to Bridges in May 1885, "I have after long silence written two sonnets, which fam touching; if ever anything was written in blood one of these was.”*! Bridges himself later concluded that the poem “written in blood!” might have been “Carrion Comfort,” but what also is ‘emphasized here is that Hopkins is “touching” two sonnets. Although we have no way of knowing which two sonnets or which sonnet “written in blood” Hopkins had in mind, “ wake and feel” and "No worst there is none” may be the “two,” for “No worst” can be read as a complex “tesponse” or echo to “I wake and feel.” No worst, there is none, Pitched past pitch of grief, More pangs will, schooledat forepangs, wilder wring, Comforter, where, where is your comforting! Mary, mother of us, where is your relief? My cries heave, herds-long, huddled in a main, a chief Woe, weld sorrow, on an age-old Anvil wince and sing— Then lull, then leave off, Fury had shricked ‘No ling:

Ering! Let me be fell: force { muist be briet O the mind, mind has mountains; clifs of fall Frightiul, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them chesp May who ne'er hung there, Nor does long our small Durance deal with that steep ot deep. Here! creep, Wretch, under a com Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.”” The last jords of "I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day,” "but worse,

nwered “No worst, there is none.” Is ues of sequence are compli cated in auditory ways, for if we here have an “answer” or echo, “no worst” will return to the earliest sounds of speech, like pains experienced retrospectively once the know! has begun, In the opening| of "No worst,” we find that word pairs are set up not via a truncated echo

ing effect but ratherin a reverse fashion, so that the first instance is ex tended: no/none, pangs/forepangs, comforter/comforting, lull lingering, (pitched past pitch of These balked phrases, interspersed with repe grief) and clotted spondees ("my cries heave, hends-l huddled in main, a chiet- / woe, wérld-sorrow"; “on an age-old anvil wince and sing then lull, then leave of”), producean effect of st utterin, tary hesitations, rapid repetitionsof speech elements, sputtering, a

of that speech dis lent explosionsof breath following a halt characteristic

order are all here. Look at the distributionof stops (d.p, k, g. b, and ¢ sounds) and nasal stops (m, n, and closing g sounds} No worsT, there is NoNe, PitcheD PasT Pitch of Grief More PaNGs will, sCHooleD aT forePaNGs, wilDer wriNC CoMforTer, where, where, is your CoMforTINC Mary, Mother of us, where is your relief My Cries heave, herDsJoNG, huDDleD in a Main, a chiet Woe, worlD-sorrow; oN aN age-olD aNvil wiNce aND siNC TheN lull, theN leave of . Fury haD shrieKed No IINC EriNG! LeT Me Be (ell: force 1 MusT Be Brief © the MIND, MIND has MouNTaiNs, Cliffs of fall FrighTful, sheer, No-MaN-fathoMeD, HolD theM chea? May who Ne‘er huNG there. Nor Does loNG our sMall DuraNce Deal with tha? sTeeP or DeeP. Here! Cree?, Wretch, uNDet a coMforTer serves in a whirlwiND; all Life Death Does eND aND each Day Dies with slee?.

%

artex Two

The stops are most intense at the beginning and end of the sonnet. In the phrases “Mary, mother of us, wher is your rel £3” and “Then lull, then leave off,” relief and lulling are palpably present as the stops briefly de But after Fury reenters, the anvil of torment is vividly rung: “liNGeriNG” echoes against all the other NG sounds: pangs. wring, comfort ing, sing, hung. long. We could draw a different map of the pattem of bilabials that would include the recurring m sounds used at the starts of words and phrases like an incessant murmuring or prayer, creating the sequence “more; Mary; mother; my; main; me; must; mind, mountains; man, may.” And the sure-footed m, associated with these words of com fort and stability, is undermined by its opposite, the unbalanced w, appearing in the sequence “worst, wilder, wring, where, where, where, woe, world-sorrow, wince, wretch, whirlwind.” An effect of pathos is also produced by the tension between the fricative (f) sounds at the ends of all unstopped lines until they geadually add the liquids (2). Tsur's study of sound implication argues that this sequence—vowels, liquids, nasals, voiced frie atives, voiced stops, voiceless fricatives, and voiceless stops—produces a decreasing periosicity or sonority of sounds, The sequence also might be read as moving like the grieving Hecuba from tones to noises or from harmonious to unharmonious sounds, Vowels, als, and liquids are all acoustically periodical, In poems that are incantatory or hypnotic, the marked regulanty of rhyme is brought forward by the emphasis on such vowels, liquids, and nasals, In Hopkins's "No worst, there is none,” the stops startle the reader in patterns that work against the meter as the frica tives recede into.a closing use of liquids. The stutterings diminish by the close of the octave, another =I se quence: “Let me be fell.” At this moment the stuttering is overcome and the opeaker is “the fell”—the animal pelt and mantle of darkness, the blow of awakened consciousness from which the thetorical grandeur of the sestet next proceeds with its admonition regarding the scale of our “small durance” “under a comfort serves in a whirlwind." The body as 4 hollow instrument nevertheless can barely breathe as it struggles into speech. In this sonnet, Hopkins does not assume the invocatory drive but rather expresses the conditions under which that drive is externalized. To read this sonnet is to listen to sound unborn being born, Nevertheless, the final line, with its deliberate and theologically bankrupt oversimplification “Life death does end and each day dies with sleep,” marks the closure of abstract human time—the closure is like a false bottom, it will of fer no consolation, hell itself gives testament to the incapacity of death to end life Carrion Comfort” can be read asa transition to "Patience, Hard

thing,” the most consoling and resolved sonnet of the group, It is likely to have been based on Ig atius’ spiritual exercise (VII atience, In "Car rion Comfort” the repetition of “not tT! not carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thi Not untwist , not choose not to be”) produces 4 pattern of negatives and positives en: double negatives— ‘ums of empest Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despals, not least on thee ‘Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man But ah, but O thou terrible, why’ wouldst thow ride onm Thy wring-earth right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against met scar h darksome devouring eyes my braiséd bones? and fan, Why? That my chatf might fly, my grain lie, sheer and clea Nay in all that toil, that coil, since {seems} I kissed the rod, Hand rather, my heart lo! lap ed strength, stole joy, would Cheer whém though?

The héro whose héaven-handling fling

Me? or mé that féught him? © which one? is i eich

laugh, cheer m

one? That night

kins brilliantly uses stops to evoke hesitation and struggle within this poem as well, yet here he concentrates on the “primitive” relation be plosive pair is often mediated by an 1 Sunday.” In Hopki first eight lines show the following pm by (5) 6 b b mi (6) mb m, m, sions: (1) mp,(2) m b; (3)m (8) mpm pm 7) m2 m bb, Yet in “Carrion Comfort” we encounter more than a problem of stut In keeping with the theme {ings are as well made problematic through the use of echo elfects. Echoes, which are themselves parasitical in the thyming words but also in consonant repetitions and inversions |

litele did nature create us as severed blocks of rocks as egotistical mo, thads| Even the most delicate chords of aiimal feeling .. even the chords whose sound and strain do not arise from choice and slow deliberation whose very nature the probing of reason has not as yet heen able to fathom, even they—though thete be no awareness of sympathy from out. side—are aligned in their entire performance for a going out toward other Yet when we turn to Homer's lines on “Philoctetus’”s (Philoctetes') find in fact that Herder has underestimated the human ca: pacity to internalize the recognition of others: Philoctetes the master atcher had led them on in seven ships with fifty oarsmen aboard each Superbly skilled with the bow in lethal combat, But their captain lay on an island, racked with ‘on Lemnos’s holy shores where the armies had marooned him, agonized by his wound, the bite of the deadly water-viper There he writhedin pain bu Joon, encamped by the ships, the Argives would recall Philoctetes, their great king.

This situation, which we might call the “Philoctetes problem’ or “the dead letter problem,” is far more complex than Herder’s presentation of it a¢ an example of animal expression indicates. How can the poet know how can anyone know—what sounds, what eries, were uttered, how agony was expressed, by Philoctetes in his abandonment? It is only be cause of @ consequent reception, one that followed the “recalling” of Philoctetes by his men after his command had been replaced by others, that such sufferis igcan be given voice. Philoctetes may call forever to the wind; itis only this reealling that can bring back the repetition of his ut terance—the repetition that also enables the poet to create the image of his suffering Le us consider one other complex exampleof the Philoctetes problem here: Shakespeare's striking use of the representation of reported suffering in Hamlet, act 4, scene ?, Here Gertrude tells Laertes that his sister has drowned, explaining There is a willow grows aslant a brook That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream, There with fantastic garlands Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purp

But our cold maid do dead men’s s fingers call then There on th boughs her caronet weed: Clamb'ring w hang, an envious sliver brok When down her we rophies and herself weeping brook. Her clothes spread wid Fell And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up; Which time she chaunted snatches of old tun As one incapable of her own distr Or like a creature native and indued Unto that clement, but long it could not | Till that her garments, heavy with their din Pall To muddy death

This passage is suffused with the sensibility of the obscene. Who has seen

the specific owers that adorned Ophelia as she fell? How does Gertrude know the grosser names that shepherds call them, and who has seen Ophelia’s clothes spread wide before they pulled her down? Who has heard the “chaunted snatches of old tunes" she sang? The situation is the oppo site of the recalling of Philoctetes. There is no survivor to report Ophelia’s cries of distress, though there must be witnesses to these details—wi nesses who heard and di¢ not intervene. No one drew Ophelia back to life whoever heard her heard as one would hear a sound of nature—without reciprocity, without listening, Ophelia therefore dies like @ part of natui into nature, a creature “native and indued / Unto that clement ans” and heaving “cries 1885 sonnets, the tormented In Hopkins's yet are locationles The “something” to which we attribute these sounds is a self “pitched past pitch” by the anxiety of his own capacity for self-reference, The po: ems are aradically vivid expression of the “silence” of lyric sound. Rather nto the human ends of heightens the torment of Hopkins’s in poiésis, What saved Hopkins, or at least saved the m it for the future, was that th and rescued the Philoctetes sble a recipient to the “dead let er"; Bridges, who so patiently brou work into history. For Hopkins, in the midst of a theological crisisr ing the reality of his perception: and the impossibility of aserbin, in poetry itself

tween many of the stanza sections: “MaN” to "iN Me" to "oN Me” be. tween the end af line two, the beginning of line 3 and the end of line5, for example, The final echo—(my God!) / my God”—implies not an answering reciprocity but the terrible hollow return of the speaker’s voice in void. This is the only kind of comfort be receives—the carrion comfort of self-reifying repetitio ‘The poem has a great deal of the hysterical mixtureof sounds one finds in extreme sit tions —“cry”; “wish”; “fan”; “frantic”, “coil” “laugh Utterances are spoken and quoted at once: “ery I can no more “cheer.” is both the addressee ean’ i, again, "(my nl!) my God.” The God who of the exclamation and the object of the verb (“1 wretch lay wrestling with my God”) appears then in the second person and the third person and so throws light {itself described negatively as “now done darkness’) back Me? or mé that féught upon the question “cheer whém though him?” Here Hopkins uses interpolated utterance (as he had in the famous “fancy, come faster” of “The Wreck of the Deutschland”)to express an agonized self-consciousness, The self who acts is part of the mortal fallen world, and the self who speaks carries a painful knowledge of the condi: tions under which he speaks, a knowledge that is inhe tly tautological: “we hear our hearts grate on themselves; it kills / To bruise them dearer, Hopkins writes in "Patience, hard thing,” thus echoing the “thotghts agiinst thoughts in groans grind” of “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves.” Hopkins had written in his Ser nons of how “nothing clse in nature comes

this unspeakable stress of pitch, distinctiveness, and selving, this seli-being of my own,” but the signs of pitch and stress that mark the individuality of being are now, in a negative analogy to poetic expression, the material cries of a material being condemned to Suffering by insight as, well as experience. Hopkins’s 1885 sonnets return us to the or ins of the invocatory drive, but in doing so they underscore the relation of sound production to

a heightened consciousnessof reception in aurality, Like the reception of visual phenomena, the reception of sound ight be framed as a feeling: wwe receive light and sound waves as we receive a toua ch, pressure. They touch not only our ear membrane but also the entire outer surface of the skin.’ Yet when we hear, we hear the soundof something; the continuity of sight does not provide an analogue to this attrib of source cause utioron in sound reception. And we do not pinpoint sound in space. We see properly only what is betore us, but sound can envelop us; we might, as we move or change, havevarying expes enges of sound's intensity, but it will not readily fit” an epistemology of spatiality, horizon, or location.” As Herder writes, “Most visible things move. Many sound while moving. If

not, they lie close to the eye in its early state, directly on it as it were and. can be felt. The sense of feeling is close to that of hearing. Its epithets. such as hard, rough, soft, woolly, velvety, hairy, rigid, smooth, prickly, ete which all concern only surfaces and do not penetrate—all though one cauld fe l the For Herder, the capacity of hearingto bring full stretch of vision nearer and to open up € 8 is key to its role in communicability. Hearing is a “middle sense, according to Herder, for other reasons as well: it mediates the vagueness of touch and the cold brightness of vision, it negotiates the par tiality of the immediacy of touch and the objectified “all at onceness” of vision, and it stands between those objects of touch that are as mute as the fell of dark and those objects of vision that are endlessly describable Whereas vision and touch refer to stationary objects, hearing indicates formation and unfolding language. Tsur describes how “while in the visual mode we are inclined to attend aw to the ob: ject signified, in the auditory mode we are inclined to attend to the ever changing labile signifier so as to be able vo detect any minute change in There is an incommensurability between the pro the reception involved in listening. Listening has no limit, no articulation, but waitsin the silence that fil s the future lying-all aboue the utterance The silence of listening permeates the poem —it exists in the silences by tween sounds and stanzas and the turning of the page. This is not the si lence of the medial caesura, whether expected or producing su perly an interval—a delimited pause between the caesura's silence i

marks of chythm. The silence all about and through the poem is outside

its meter and rhythm; it is not yet awakened. Every the markedt ‘dead” letter stilldreams of animationin this sense. Herder writes this issue at the very beginning of his “Essay on the Origin of Language While still an animal, man alreadyhas language. All violent senatio of his body, and amongthe violent the most violent, those which cause oul express themselves direct him pain, and all strongpai no les tones. A suffering animal, in sounds, in inarticulate screams, in

sight or trac on a desert island, without even though it be abandoned hope of a helpfulfellow creature. Its as though it could breathe mon freely as ic vents its burning, frightened spirit. [tis as though it out part of its pain and at least draw m from the empty airspace new a strength of endurance as it fils the unhearing winds with

But Bridges's commitment to Hopkins’s letters is significant for the I want to make, in closing this chapter, between the silence of analogy the poem and the recalled aurality of its reception. There is 4 limit to the ing or hear a metaphor of presence in lyric. Wh we attend a poetry poem read aloud by its author in a recording or some other context, we ‘may confuse the speech in the poem with the speech of the person, and we may confuse the person who speaks with either the person who speaks in the poem or the person who speaks at the reading, It is not that such information is not useful and intere ing) however, it will be information that will be both too particular (specific to an occasion) and too general th trical and repeatable in its exaggeration of “significant” features), As a consequence, the “poet” him- or herself runs the risk af becomingan aract of the poem, and the poem itself becomes an artifact of performance. I propose that the sound of poetry is heard in the way a promise is heard. A promise is an action made in speech, in the sense not of something scripted or repeatable but of something that “happens,” that “oc8" as an event and can be continually called on, called to mind, in the unfolding present. When I promise, I create an expectation, an obligation, nd a necessary condition for elosure. Whether we are in the presence of each other or not, the promise exists, Whether you, the one who receives the promise, continue to exist or not, the promise exists. Others may discontinue making and fulfilling promises, the word promise might disap: pear, you or others may no longer remember, or deserve, or make sense of that promise—nevertheless, the promise exists. As]. L. Austin wrote in How to Do Things with Words, promises and other "commissives” are not intentions, although intending itself is a commissive—"deelarations of intention differ from undertakings” especially if they are framed by the expression I intend." The promise can be, must be, fulfilled in time; a “broken promise” cannot be mended—it can only be regretted or used to establish new grounds of demand or indifference. When we consider the historical path of lyric poetry, we find an ongoing process o xplotation of the dynamic we have already mentioned between an “I 1 (the speaker) and a “you” (the addressee), Poetry can, it is true, inve a speaker speaking to him: or het elf as another, and it can involl an apostrophe to the wind or to a crowd, Bue personification is voiced in poetry—that is, voice takes place not merely as a presence but as the condition under which the person appears, The realization of ex: pression depends on the bind, the implicit tie of intelligibility between speaker and listener that links their efforts toward closure. Through lyric we return literally to the breath and pulse of speech thythm in tension

with thos. ifest. In this way

VOICE

I.

AND

POSSESSION

Tue Brtoven’s Vorce

|

et’s say 1am thinking aboutmy love for your voice—not the source of my love for your voice, but what it is love when I lave your voic What is the “object” of this love? I could not love the voice of an animal the voice of a god. I would not be able truly to listen to the voice of an animal, and I could not bear to listen, on the scale of human history we live, to the voice of a god. Yet it is not really the anticipation of voice. Noris it simply that the voic procity that fue s metonymic to the body as a whole. We love voices vessels of that presence we cal the soul: to love the voice and the eyes is far different irom loving the color of someone'shair or even someor of walking. The individuation of the voice is not synonymou: \e eral an entity, too material a substance, to accountfor the the voice. After death, when the voice is silent and the Ii

individualit

Marcel Proust, in his account of Marcel's first experience with a tel phone in The Guermantes Way, writes with great subtlety on the love for s voice and the love expressed in-a voice. In this passage, Marcel awaits call from his grandmother. He is at Donciéres and sh Paris. And when the call comes, he hears her voice for the first time: “seen w:

the mask of her face, I noticed in it for the first time the sorrows that had ctacked it in the course of a lifetime.” He hears her voice as her voice, not as the instrument of language and expression but in its particularity as the reservoir of her life's experiences.’ In complex ways this scene will bear upon a later situation of involuntary memory as Marcel puts on his boots in the hotel room in Balbec where previously he and his grandmother had on the party wall communicated by means of a pri te language of knocks between them. Marcel will for ¢ first time acknowledge to himself the in the discussionof this first experienceof reality of her death. Yet al the telephone, the narrator reali s that to hear the individuality, the idiosyneratic “grain” af the voice, is both to encounter and to defer the en: counter with the death of the beloved: Alt what a distance we may be from the persons we love at the moment when it seems that we have only to stretch out our hands to seize and hold them. A real presence, perhaps, that voice that seemed so near—tn actual separation! But a premonition also of an eternal separation! Many are the times; as [listened thus without seeing her who spoke to me from ed to me that the voice was eryingto me from the depths out of which one does not rise again, and I have felt the anxiety that was one day to wringmy heart when 2 voice would thas retuim jalone and attached no longerto a bo again], to murmur in my ear words I longed to kiss a8 they issued from lips forever turned to dust The beloved’s voice is untouchable. It is that which touches me and

which L cannot touch. Yet the one who “owns” it—that is, the one who belongs to it—cannot touch it either. T cannot see my eyes when I see, they ate invisible to me,* And I cannot hear my own voice when I speak: hear only its echo or resonance and when it comes to me on a recording it comes as a stranger's voice s horrid and uncanny as a glimpse of my ‘own corpse. The voice and the eyes take part in the more general truth that I cannot witness my own moti a whole: I cannot see what is

alive about myself and so dependon the view of others. [tis the viewpoint of the beloved that gives witness to what is alive in our being, What Proust brings forward is that what is irreducible in one’s voice is the imreducibility of one’s death. Yet as the individual voice contains within it the seed of its own disappearance, its fragility and imperma ence, so, nits fleetingness, does it bear a kind of aural imprint of its his-

tory, its ancestry —in the voice is the voice of all first voices. The dead are the source of the continuing seed of death in the voice. And when we love

voices, we love beyond language, beyond articulation. All lave may be, as Freud contends in Civiliz Discontents, counter to socialization;* but the love for the voice alone is the most asocialof all—not be cause it returns us to an animal connection, for in this sense animal voices are preeminently social, but rather because the love of a voice in its indi viduality draws us toward all that resists the law, inc ing that death which has dominion over law. Voice in poetry isa further development of a path ard volition that

Hegel describes in his Philosophy of Fine Art: “Motion, however, is not

the only expression of ani The free tones of the voices of ani mals, which are unknown in the inorganic world, where bodies merely roar and clatter through the blow of objects external to them, then already present to us in the higher expression mated subjectivity."* But be cause poetic voice is informed by, often indeed formed by, the imperatives of rhythm and repetition, its volition is problematic—more problematic than, say, the production of discursive sentencesin prose such as th Jc. We will see that this doubled movement in poetic production, toward mastery on the one hand and toward being mastered on the other, has po etry suspect as a force against reason and valued as a means of ecstasis. It is suggestive that in his late nineteenth-century history of Greek poetic forms, Gilhert Murray mentions the Socratic tradition that “string instruments allow you to be master of yourself, while flute, pipe; © onette or whatever corresponds to various kindsof ‘aulos' puts you beside yourself, obscures reason and is more fit for barbarians,”? Tactility, ma. nipulation, and externalization remain the “touchstones" of reality here and the wind as « force of possession le of transport and self transformation. In our discussion of sound, I have emphasized the broadest aspects of sound production and reception in poetry: such aspects are continuous with our reception of sound in nature, in manmade environments. and and fear, But I have with, animal cries, and utterances, conversation underemphasi